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W/m  n^^^!^^^^^?!f^ 

'4j^  PRINCETON,  N.  J.  4f, 


Presented    by~T='x-(S5\C^^Y-^\-     \0\\-\or\ 

BX  5880  .C737  1897 
Crapsey,  Algernon  Sidney, 

1847-1927. 
A  voice  in  the  wilderness 


A  VOICE  IN  THE  WILDERNESS 


BEING  A   PI,EA   FOR  THE   RESTORATION   OF 


Primitive    Christianity 


ADDRESSED  To   THE 


BISHOPS   OF   THE   ANGLO-AMERICAN   COMMUNION 


AND  THROUGH   THEM   TO   THE 


English-Speaking  People  Throughout  the  World 


BY 

AI.GERNON  SIDNEY  CRAPSEY 

Rector  of  S.  Andrew's  Church 

Rochester,  new  York 


NEW  YORK : 

James  Potts  &  Co. 
1897 


Copyright,  1897, 

by 

Ai^GERNON  Sidney  Crapsey. 


CONTENTS. 


Page 

Letter  Dedicatory, 5 

Book  First  : 

An  Interpretation  of  the  Quadrilateral,  .         .         23 
Book  Second  : 

The  Office  and  Work  of  a  Bishop  in  the  Church 

of  God,        .......         97 

An  Argument, 152 


A  LETTER  DEDICATORY 


ADDRESSED    TO 


Right  Reverend  FREDERICK  DAN  HUNTINGTON 

Doctor  ill  Divinity 

Doctor  171  Laws 

Doctor  ill  the  Humanities 

Bishop  of  Central  New   York 


Letter  Dedicatory. 

My  Dear  Bishop  : 

In  the  early  daj^s  of  book-writing  and  book-making 
it  was  customary  for  an  author  of  little  note  to  pub- 
lish his  book  under  the  patronage  of  some  noble 
and  celebrated  name  ;  hoping  to  overcome  his  own 
obscurity  by  adding  to  it  the  celebrity  of  his  patron. 

Following  this  ancient  custom,  I  venture  to  bring 
out  this  little  book  under  the  cover  of  your  distin- 
guished name  and  to  beg  for  it  the  patronage  of  your 
high  office  and  the  support  of  your  venerated  and 
beloved  personality. 

I  make  this  appeal  for  help  the  more  urgently 
because  what  I  do  in  this  book  may  seem  to  savour  of 
presumption,  and  maj^  bring  upon  me  the  reproach 
justly  due  to  one  who  ' '  exercises  himself  in  great 
matters  which  are  too  high  for  him." 

I,  who  am  less  than  the  least  of  all  saints,  who  am 
but  a  parish  priest  with  nothing  to  distinguish  me 
from  the  thousands  who  hold  and  exercise  the  same 
office,  venture  to  speak  to  those  who  are  over  me  in 
the  Lord.  I  address  my  words  to  the  Bishops  of  the 
Anglo-American  Communion. 

In  so  rash  an  undertaking  it  is  necessary  that  I 
fortify  myself  in  everj^  possible  way  so  that  I  may 
secure  a  fair  hearing  and  a  just  judgment. 

I  can  think  of  no  better  method  of  gaining  the 
favor  of  those  with  whom  I  wish  to  plead  than  by 
placing  myself  under  the  protection  of  some  eminent 
member  of  their  sacred  order. 

I  have  chosen  you  as  my  sponsor  because  for  more 
than  twenty  years  it  has  been  my  privilege  to  think 


of  you  as  a  father  and  a  friend.  From  my  earliest 
manhood  you  have  followed  my  life  with  affectionate 
interest,  and  I  have  looked  upon  yours  with  reverent 
admiration. 

It  is  that  life  which  has  inspired  me  with  the  hope 
that  we  may  have  with  us  once  more  Bishops  in  the 
Church  of  God,  who  shall  revive  among  us  the  prim- 
itive Christian  life  :  simple-hearted  men,  living  simple 
lives  in  the  midst  of  a  simple  people  ;  men  who  care 
least  of  all  for  their  honors  and  their  dignities  and 
most  of  all  for  the  Church  of  God  which  He  has  pur- 
chased with  His  own  blood. 

You  have  been  to  me  and  to  many  the  ideal  of 
what  such  a  Bishop  should  be  :  your  austere  life  : 
your  sanctified  learning  :  your  devotion  to  God  and 
your  sympathy  for  man,  give  hope  to  all  who  are 
praying  for  the  restoration  of  the  primitive  life  of  the 
Church. 

There  is  a  scene  in  mj^  memory  which  I  will  never 
forget.  I  had  occasion  to  visit  you  a  year  or  so  ago. 
It  was  in  the  winter  time  and  the  day  was  cold  and 
stormy.  As  I  passed  through  the  country  I  looked 
out  upon  a  white  and  desolate  world.  When  I 
alighted  from  the  railway  car  and  walked  down  the 
station,  I  saw  an  old  man  coming  toward  me,  bending 
under  the  weight  of  a  heavy  bag.  No  one  took  notice 
of  him.  My  heart  was  full  of  pity  for  the  old  man 
because  he  had  to  be  abroad  on  such  a  day  of  wind  and 
snow.  But  when  he  came  nearer  pity  was  changed 
to  admiration,  for  he  lifted  his  head  and  there  flashed 
over  his  face  a  smile  of  recognition  and  I  saw  it  was 
the  Bishop  of  Central  New  York.  He  was  coming 
home  from  his  northern  visitation. 

That  sight  was  to  me  a  confirmation  of  Faith.  It 
proved  to  me  that  the  men  of  to-day  are  as  devoted  as 
any  men  who  have  lived  and  labored  in  the  Church  of 


God.     It  assured  me  that  we  not  only  have  Apostolic 
succession,  but  that  we  have  Apostles. 

I  would  not  dare  to  write  such  words  of  j^ou  did  I 
not  know  that  you  have  passed  bej'ond  the  reach  of 
the  praise  or  blame  of  man.  ' '  For  now  are  you  ready 
to  be  offered  and  the  time  of  your  departure  is  at  hand  ; 
you  have  fought  a  good  fight,  you  have  finished  your 
course  :  you  have  kept  the  faith."*  You  are  still  with 
us  and  are  working  for  us,  ' '  but  it  is  toward  evening 
and  the  day  is  far  spent,  "f 
You  are  no  longer 

' '  With  the  reapers  reaping  early 
In  among  the  bearded  barley," 

but  you  are  where 

"  By  the  moon  the  reapers  weary 
PiUng  sheaves  in  uplands  airy  "J 

listen  and  wait  for  the  Voice  that  calls  them  home. 

Already,  though  you  know  it  not,  there  has  come 
over  you  that  change  which  comes  at  last  to  all  the 
children  of  God  :  you  no  longer  ' '  bear  the  image  of 
the  earthy, ' '   you  ' '  bear  the  image  of  the  heavenly. "  1 1 

Your  age,  your  learning,  your  well  known  devotion 
to  the  truth  as  it  is  in  Jesus,  make  you  of  all  men  the 
one  whom  I  would  have  for  mj^  advocate  with  the 
men  that  are  your  fellows.  And  so,  without  your 
permission  and  without  making  you  responsible  for  a 
single  word  that  I  say,  I  beg  j^ou  to  help  me  with 
your  sympathy  and  your  prayers. 

And  I  ask  this  favor  the  more  boldly  because  I 
have  in  your  sacred  office  the  reason  and  the  excuse 
for  all  I  wish  to  sa3^ 

*  II  Timothy  iv,  6,  7.  f  S.  Luke  xxiv,  29. 

J  Tennyson,  Lady  of  vShalott.  ||  I  Cor.  xv,  49. 


The  Christian  communion  to  which  you  and  I 
belong  is  separated  from  all  other  Christian  commu- 
nions by  the  fact  that  it  is  Episcopal. 

We  do  not  eat  and  drink  at  the  Lord's  table  with 
other  Christian  men  and  women,  because  we  think 
that  they  have  no  right  to  spread  any  table  at  all. 
We  think  of  them  as  Israel  thought  of  Reuben  and 
Gad  and  the  half  tribe  of  Manasseh  :  *  as  brethren 
who  have  builded  altars  for  themselves,  and  who  no 
longer  worship  at  the  true  altar  of  God. 

We  claim  that  they  are  separated  from  the  Church 
of  God,  which  is  the  object  of  His  love  and  to  which 
He  gave  the  promises.  We  assert  distinctly  that  He 
' '  has  promised  to  be  with  the  ministers  of  the  Apostolic 
succession  to  the  end  of  the  world,  "f  And  we  hold 
that  ours  is  that  ministr)^  of  Apostolic  succession. 

It  is  our  belief  in  the  fact  of  an  Apostolic  ministry 
which  isolates  us  and  forbids  our  full  communion 
with  millions  round  about  us,  who  call  themselves 
Christians. 

And  when  these  separated  brethren  call  upon  us  to 
justify  our  isolation,  and  ask  us  what  good  the  Apos- 
tolic ministry  has  done  for  us,  we  answer  much  every 
way. 

In  the  first  place,  the  simple  fact  that  it  is  Apostolic 
is  a  great  blessing.  It  is  a  ministry  which  we  did  not 
create  for  ourselves,  but  which  was  created  for  us.  It 
is  a  ministry  ' '  which  is  not  of  men,  nor  by  man,  but 
by  Jesus  Christ  and  God  the  Father  who  raised  Him 
from  the  dead."| 

This  ministry,  as  we  believe,  is  the  creation  of  the 
Breath  of  Jesus  Christ.  As  God  of  old  breathed  into 
the  nostrils  of  Adam  and  he  became  a  living  soul, 
so  Christ  our  God  breathed  upon  His  Apostles  and 

*  Joshua  xxii,  17,  18.         f  Office  for  Ordination  of  Deacons. 
i  Galatians  i,  i. 


— 9— 

they  became  a  living,  organic  body  with  special 
faculties  for  their  special  work.  And  we  hold  it  to 
be  self-evident,  that  this  organic  bod}^  called  into 
being  by  the  breath  of  God,  was  gifted  with  that 
wonderful  power  which  God  gives  to  every  living 
creature,  which  is  the  power  of  reprodudlion. 

The  ministry  to  which  we  cleave  is,  we  believe,  as 
directly  the  descendant  of  the  Apostolic  ministry  as 
we  ourselves  are  the  descendants  of  Adam. 

And  this  ministry  has  had  a  long  and  eventful  his- 
tory. It  kept  company  with  Jesus  ;  "beginning  with 
the  baptism  of  John,  unto  that  same  day  that  He  was 
taken  up  from  them."=i^ 

As  soon  as  the  promise  of  Jesus  was  fulfilled  and 
power  came  upon  them  from  on  high,  the  Apostolic 
ministry  went  forth  and  preached  everywhere,  "  the 
lyord  working  with  them  and  confirming  the  word 
with  signs  following."! 

For  more  than  three  hundred  years  this  Apostolic 
ministry  ' '  suffered  persecution  for  the  Cross  of 
Christ."  It  was  by  the  verj^  fa(ft  of  its  existence, 
separate  from  sinners.  It  had  no  communion  with 
the  great  religions  round  about  it.  It  was  isolated 
alike  from  Jew  and  Gentile.  ' '  It  had  an  altar 
whereof  they  had  no  right  to  eat  who  served  the 
tabernacle.  "J 

When  the  Church  had  peace,  then  this  Apostolic 
ministry  rose,  the  center  of  unity  and  the  principle  of 
order  in  the  midst  of  a  wild  and  chaotic  world.  That 
civilization  in  the  midst  of  which  we  live,  which  we 
call  the  Christian  civilization,  is  due  to  the  presence 
and  work  of  the  ministers  of  the  Apostolic  succession. 

We  English-speaking  people  owe  all  that  is  best  in 
our  lives  to  the  charity  of  S.  Gregory  of  Rome,  to  the 
missionar}^   labors   of  S.    Augustine   of  Canterbury, 

*  Acts  i,  22.  t  Mark  xvi,  20.  X  Hebrews  xiii,  10. 


and  the  devotion  of  S.  Cuthbert  and  his  fellows  of  Lin- 
disfarne,  and  these  were  all  members  of  the  Apostolic 
ministry. 

Beside  these  there  have  been  a  host  which  no  man 
can  number,  who  have  subdued  kingdoms,  wrought 
righteousness,  stopped  the  mouths  of  lions  ;  quenched 
the  violence  of  fire  ;  escaped  the  edge  of  the  sword  ; 
out  of  weakness  were  made  strong  ;  waxed  valiant  in 
fight ;  turned  to  flight  the  armies  of  the  aliens.* 

It  is  to  us  a  controlling  thought  and  one  from 
which  we  cannot  turn  away,  that  in  the  Apostolic 
ministry,  to  say  nothing  of  the  Apostolic  Church,  we 
find  more  than  anywhere  else  in  the  world  the  heroes 
of  Christianity  ;  the  men  who  have  lived  and  died 
for  it ;  the  men  who  have  made  its  history.  To  for- 
sake that  ministry  is  to  cut  ourselves  away  from  our 
own  past ;  it  is  to  deny  our  parentage  and  to  lose  our 
heritage. 

This,  then,  is  our  first  reason  for  holding  to  the 
Apostolic  ministry.  We  love  it  because  it  is  Apos- 
tolic, because  by  means  of  it  we  are  of  the  household 
of  God,  and  fellow-citizens  with  the  saints. 

And  to  the  Apostolic  ministry  we  owe  that  mode  of 
of  Divine  worship,  than  which  we  think  there  is  no 
other  in  the  world. 

It  is  the  tradition  of  the  Church  that  we  owe  those 
wonderful  liturgies,  or  forms  of  divine  worship,  by 
which  to-day  we  approach  the  mercy  seat,  to  the 
inspired  labors  of  S.  Peter,  S.  James,  S.  John,  and  S. 
Mark.  But  be  this  as  it  may,  we  certainly  owe  our 
sacramental  worship  to  the  Apostolic  Church,  of 
which  the  Apostolic  ministry  was  the  head. 

And   having  once    entered   into  and   enjoyed    this 
worship,  we  can  be  content  with  no  other.     We  find 
in  it  the  full  satisfaction  of  all  our  spiritual  desires. 
*  Hebrew  xi,  33,  34. 


—  1 1 — 

Who  that  has  worshipped  after  the  manner  of  the 
Apostolic  Church  under  the  guidance  of  the  Apos- 
toHc  ministry  ;  who  that  has  gone  the  round  of  that 
wonderful  Christian  year  ;  each  day  and  hour  set  in 
its  place,  ordered  and  regulated  by  the  Presence  of 
Jesus  Christ,  the  Sun  of  this  world  of  righteousness 
as  the  days  of  the  natural  year  are  set  in  order  and 
regulated  bj^  the  presence  of  the  sun  of  the  natural 
world  ;  who,  I  sa}^,  having  once  lived  in  this  country 
of  spiritual  beauty,  with  all  its  wonderful  variety, 
would  care  to  forsake  it  for  the  barrenness  of  what 
lies  without ;  to  go  where  every  Sunday  is  simply 
Sunday  ;  where  worship  is  at  loose  ends  and  hap- 
hazard ;  where  men  pray  each  out  of  his  own  shallow 
heart  and  not  as  the  Apostolic  ministry,  out  of  the 
deep  heart  of  the  Church  ? 

For  this  gift  of  a  sacramental  worship,  making  us 
one  with  Christ  as  he  is  one  with  the  Father ;  we 
are  grateful  to  the  Apostolic  ministry  from  whom  it 
comes.     For  this  we  will  cleave  to  it  forever. 

And  moreover  to  this  Apostolic  ministry  we  are 
indebted  for  a  knowledge  of  God,  which  is  the  light 
of  our  intelligence  and  the  stay  of  our  souls.  From 
the  very  first  it  has  been  one  of  the  great  functions  of 
the  Apostolic  ministry  to  know  the  I^ord. 

This  knowledge  of  God  in  the  heart  of  the  Apostolic 
ministry  is  the  rock  upon  which  rests  the  Church  of 
the  living  God. 

It  was  at  Caesarea  Philippi  that  the  Blessed  L^ord 
Jesus  sounded  the  heart  of  the  Apostolic  ministry  for 
the  foundation  of  the  Church. 

He  said,  "But  whom  say  ye  that  I  am?"  And 
when  S.  Peter,  speaking  for  the  corporate  body  said 
"Thou  art  the  Christ,  the  Son  of  the  living  God;" 
then  Jesus  rejoiced  and  said,  "  Blessed  art  thou, 
Simon  Bar-Jona,  for  flesh  and  blood  hath  not  revealed 


-12- 


it  unto  thee,  but  mj^  Father  which  is  in  heaven.  And 
I  say  also  unto  thee  :  thou  art  Peter,  and  upon  this 
rock  I  will  build  mj^  Church,  and  the  gates  of  hell 
shall  not  prevail  against  it.'"*^ 

And  from  that  day  to  this  the  lips  of  the  Apostolic 
ministry  have  kept  knowledge.  That  vast  body  of 
Divine  truth  with  which  we  feed  our  intellect  and 
enrich  our  souls  is,  in  a  large  measure,  the  work  of  the 
Apostolic  ministry,  of  the  Bishops,  the  Priests  and  the 
Deacons,  of  whom  that  ministry  is  composed. 

Much  work  has,  in  these  latter  days,  been  done  by 
men  outside  the  Apostolic  ministry,  and  for  this  we 
owe  them  thanks.  But  these  workers  are  themselves 
only  hewers  at  the  Apostolic  quarries. 

The  material  for  their  work  comes  from  the  Apos- 
tolic ministry ;  from  Peter  and  from  Paul,  from 
Clement,  and  from  Cyprian,  from  Basil  and  from 
Gregory,  from  Augustine  and  from  Jerome,  from  Bede 
and  from  Anselm,  and  from  the  long  line  of  doctors 
from  Apollos  down  to  your  honored  self,  who  have 
confirmed  the  Divine  word  by  their  holiness  and 
illustrated  it  by  their  wisdom. 

And,  moreover,  that  form  of  sound  words  which 
we  call  the  Apostles'  Creed,  and  which  is  the  all-suffi- 
cient expression  of  our  faith  and  our  love,  we  derive 
from  the  Apostolic  ministry. 

When  we  think  thus  of  our  history  and  our  heritage, 
we  say  surely  ours  is  a  blessed  fortune.  We  have 
riches  in  possession.  Other  men  have  labored  and  we 
have  entered  into  their  labors,  and  as  is  the  habit  with 
prosperous  people,  we  have  an  unconscious  feeling  of 
scorn  and  pity  for  all  who  do  not  share  with  us  in  the 
privileges  of  our  spiritual  birth. 

But  when  we  turn  from  the  contemplation  of  our 
possessions  to  think  of  the  use  which  we  make  of 
*  S.  Matthew  xvi,  15-18. 


—  13— 

them  ;  when  we  think  of  what  we  have  and  then  of 
what  we  do,  our  soul  is  filled  with  strange  and  sad 
misgivings. 

We  have  the  Apostolic  ministry,  worship  and  creed, 
and  from  these  ought  to  follow  the  Apostolic  life. 
Having  these  notes  of  the  Church,  we  ought  to  be 
the  Church  of  God  in  this  land  of  ours. 

This  is  indeed  our  claim.  We  like  to  call  ourselves 
the  American  Church.  But  our  claim  is  not  admitted 
by  the  great  mass  of  American  Christians,  and  as  we 
have  no  way  of  enforcing  our  claim,  it  must  be  on  our 
lips  either  a  boast  or  a  prophec}^ 

If  we  say  that  we,  the  members  of  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church  in  the  United  States  of  America, 
are  the  only  Christians,  the  only  people  of  God  in  this 
land,  then  our  claim  is  not  only  an  idle  boast,  it  is  a 
cruel  and  shameful  boast. 

We  are  in  danger  of  falling  into  the  sin  of  Pharisa- 
ism, For  upon  what  do  we  rest  our  claim  that  we  are 
the  chosen  of  God  ?  Is  it  upon  the  fact  that  though 
we  be  few  in  number  we  are  great  in  life  ?  that  we 
are  the  most  Christ-like  of  all  the  people  of  the  land  ? 
Is  it  that  while  others  are  followers  of  God  in  name, 
we  are  followers  in  reality  ? 

Both  you  and  I  have  heard  our  Church  likened  to 
the  Apostolic  Church,  not  only  in  its  ministry,  doc- 
trine and  worship,  but  also  in  its  comparative  strength. 
The  Apostolic  Church  was  a  little  one  ;  our  Episcopal 
Church  is  a  little  one,  and  this  resemblance  is  another 
proof  of  our  Apostolic  character. 

And  so  it  would  be  if  our  membership  were  in 
quality  as  well  as  in  quantity  like  the  membership  of 
the  Apostolic  Church. 

The  members  of  the  Apostolic  Church  were  the 
choice  and  heroic  spirits  of  their  age,  who  were  readj^ 
to,  and  actuall}^  did,  hazard  their  all  upon  the  venture 


—  14— 

of  their  faith.  They  were  few  in  number,  because 
they  were  the  chosen  of  God.  But  they  were  in  fact 
the  greatest  of  all  people.  In  them  was  the  promise 
of  the  future  :  thej^  were  the  seed  of  the  Kingdom  of 
God. 

Now  if  this  be  our  character,  we  need  not  fear  to 
stand  by  our  claim  to  be  the  people  of  God  :  His  true 
and  only  Church  in  this  land. 

But  I  have  heard  it  said  :  I  do  not  know  if  the  say- 
ing be  true,  that  our  Church  is  the  church  of  the 
wealthy  and  the  fashionable  of  this  world,  and  that 
the  men  and  women  do  not  in  any  way  forsake  their 
wealth  or  their  fashion  Avhen  they  come  into  the 
Church,  but  bring  it  with  them  and  make  the  very 
House  of  God  the  scene  of  their  pride  and  the  place  of 
their  vain  display.  We  are  told  that  the  members  of 
the  Church  are  in  no  wise  to  be  distinguished  from 
the  people  of  the  world  in  the  use  and  abuse  of  their 
wealth. 

I  have  been  told,  what  I  cannot  believe  to  be  true, 
that  we  have  rich  and  fashionable  churches,  churches 
in  which  no  poor  person  is  ever  seen,  churches  that 
are  the  gateway  to  the  most  corrupt  and  fashionable 
life  in  our  great  cities. 

It  is  asserted  that  our  places  of  worship  will  for  the 
most  part  be  found  in  the  neighborhood  of  the  rich 
and  the  well-to-do. 

A  distinguished  priest  said  to  me  a  few  daj^s  ago  : 
"  We  have  never  succeeded  in  making  the  poor  at 
home  in  our  churches." 

If  that  be  true,  or  in  any  measure  true,  then  we 
cannot  base  our  claim  to  be  the  people  of  God  upon 
the  fewness  of  our  numbers. 

We  are  few  in  numbers,  not  because  we  are  the 
chosen  of  God,  who  are  always  the  few  among  the 
many,  but  because  we  are  the  chosen  of  the  world,  the 


—  15— 

rich,  the  fashionable,  the  powerful,  who  are  likewise 
always  the  few  among  the  many. 

Now  I  do  not  assert  that  this  charge  against  us  is 
supported  by  the  facts,  but  the  charge  is  made,  and  it 
is  for  us  to  see  how  much  of  truth  there  is  in  it. 

We  must  admit,  for  it  is  our  pride  and  boast,  that 
we  have  a  larger  proportion  of  the  wealthy  and  im- 
portant people  of  the  land  in  our  churches  than  there 
are  in  any  other  Christian  community. 

This  fact  of  the  wealth  and  importance  of  our  mem- 
bership is  an  immeasurable  advantage,  if  our  wealth 
be  consecrated  and  our  importance  humbled  to  the 
service  of  Christ. 

But  if  our  wealth  is  used  for  our  own  ease,  comfort 
and  luxury  ;  if  we  make  class  distinction  in  our  very 
churches,  having  churches  for  the  rich  and  chapels 
for  the  poor,  then  our  claim  to  be  the  Church  of  God 
in  this  land  fails  in  a  most  important  particular.  We 
have  Apostolic  ministry,  doctrine  and  faith,  but  we 
have  not  Apostolic  life. 

Nothing  is  more  certain  than  that  our  holy  relig- 
ion came  into  this  world  as  a  way  of  life.  "Go," 
said  the  Holy  Spirit  to  the  imprisoned  Apostles, 
' '  and  stand  in  the  temple  and  preach  the  way  of  this 
life." 

It  was  not  the  doctrine  of  the  Church  in  and  of  it- 
self, nor  the  worship  of  the  Church  alone,  nor  the  fact 
of  an  Apostolic  ministry  that  brought  about  the  con- 
version of  the  ancient  world.  The  great  power  of 
God  for  the  accomplishment  of  that  work  was  the 
Christian  life. 

That  life  had  three  marks  or  characteristics  by 
which  it  was  distinguished  from  every  other  life  in  the 
world.  These  marks  were  devotion  to  Christ,  per- 
sonal purity  and  brotherly  love  (which  brotherly  love 
found  its  expression  in  social  equality.)     I  dwell  at 

2 


— 16— 

large  on  these  elements  of  the  Christian  life  in  a  por- 
tion of  the  book  that  follows  this  letter. 

I  wish  here  to  call  attention  to  the  fact  that  these 
elements  are  related  to  each  other  by  way  of  cause  and 
efifect.  Devotion  to  Christ  produces  as  its  natural 
effects  personal  purity  and  brotherly  love. 

The  very  word  Christian  implies  personal  purity 
and  brotherly  love.  We  cannot  conceive  of  a  Chris- 
tian character  without  them. 

In  the  days  of  the  Church's  greatness,  these  forces 
of  devotion,  purity  and  social  charity  were  practical 
and  operative,  and  were  the  cause  of  that  greatness. 

The  saving  grace  of  God  in  Christ  Jesus  manifested 
itself  in  turning  every  man  from  his  iniquities,  and 
it  swept  away  all  artificial  and  worldly  distinctions. 
In  the  presence  of  the  great  fact  of  man's  salvation 
in  Christ  Jesus,  all  differences  between  man  and  man 
were  lost  sight  of.  There  were  no  longer  rich  or 
poor,  high  or  low,  bond  or  free  :  all  were  one  in 
Christ  Jesus. 

In  the  first  wave  of  Christian  enthusiasm,  Christians 
that  had  lands  or  possessions  sold  them  and  laid  the 
price  at  the  Apostles'  feet  and  they  had  all  things 
common. 

And  while  that  method  of  expressing  man's  devo- 
tion to  Christ  and  the  brethren  did  not,  for  obvious 
reasons,  long  continue,  yet  the  principle  that  prompted 
it  was  the  ruling  principle  of  the  Church  during  its 
formative  period,  and  is  and  ever  will  be  an  essential 
element  of  the  constitution  of  the  Christian  com- 
munity. 

Every  Christian  man  and  woman  holds  life  and 
property  subject  to  the  needs  and  will  of  the  com- 
munity. 

If  it  was  necessary  for  a  man  to  die  for  the  faith, 
he  died  willingly  and  gladly.     If  the  welfare  of  the 


—17— 

community  required  the  property  of  a  man,  then  he 
made  of  that  property  a  willing  sacrifice  upon  the 
altar  of  his  love. 

The  first  preaching  of  this  doctrine  of  fellowship 
or  community  life,  produced  the  most  important  social 
revolution  in  the  history  of  the  world.  It  destroyed 
the  institution  of  slavery  in  the  Roman  Empire. 

In  the  treatise  which  follows  I  have  called  attention 
to  the  fact  that  the  Roman  world  found  its  lost  man- 
hood in  the  Christian  Church. 

Now  when  we  think  of  this  great  life  of  the  Chris- 
tian Church,  with  its  devotion  to  God,  its  personal 
purity,  its  brotherly  love  and  its  social  equality, 
we  dare  not  boast  before  God  or  the  people. 

We  must  see  that  as  a  Church  we  are  far  gone  from 
our  original  righteousness.  We  have  sinned  and  our 
fathers. 

If  our  claim  be  not  a  boast  it  must  be  a  prophecy. 
We  may  believe  that  we  are  in  this  modern  world 
what  the  children  of  Israel  were  in  the  ancient  world  : 
a  rebellious  and  stiff-necked  people,  and  yet  for  all 
that  a  people  chosen  of  God  to  be  the  ministers  of 
His  Providence. 

Our  Apostolic  ministry,  doctrine  and  worship  are  a 
trust  committed  unto  us  until  all  His  people  are  ready 
to  use  them. 

Already  the  people  outside  the  Church  in  the  great 
Christian  denominations  are  taking  from  us  one  by 
one  our  catholic  possessions.  We  no  longer  keep 
the  feasts  of  Christmas  and  of  Easter  alone.  We 
keep  them  in  company  not  onlj^  with  catholic  Chris- 
tians, but  also  with  the  vast  majority  of  those  who 
are  outside  the  formal  pale  of  the  Church. 

Our  forms  of  worship  are  commending  themselves 
every  day  to  the  devotion  of  all  who  would  worship 
decently  and  in  order.     One  does  not  need  even  to  be 


— 18— 

a  believer  in  the  atonement  to  feel  their  force  and 
beauty.  A  woman,  the  wife  of  a  Unitarian  pastor, 
once  said  to  me,  "There  is  nothing  in  the  world  so 
helpful  to  reverence  and  devotion  as  that  service  in 
your  Church  which  you  call  the  Holy  Communion." 

And  if  we  had  the  Primitive  and  Apostolic  episco- 
pate we  would  find  the  world  almost  ready  to  receive 
it.  "  We  feel  painfully  the  need  of  a  Bishop,"  said  a 
Presbyterian  pastor  to  me  a  few  days  ago. 

Now  if  we  can  only  give  with  Christian  doctrine, 
worship  and  ministry  the  Christian  life,  then  that 
Christian  unity,  for  which  we  all  pra}^  will  come 
quickly  to  pass. 

And  there  are  signs  of  the  times  which  indicate 
that  out  of  this  Church,  which  has  been  the  Church 
of  the  wealthy,  the  cultured,  and  if  you  please,  the 
fashionable,  is  to  come  forth  a  force  for  the  con- 
verting of  the  modern  English  world. 

It  is  no  longer  true  of  us,  if  it  was  ever  true,  that 
we  are  indifferent  to  the  people.  We  are  the  first  in 
all  this  land  to  insist  that  the  House  of  God  must  be 
free  to  all  the  people  of  God,  and  open  always  for 
prayer,  public  and  private.  More  than  eighty  per 
cent,  of  our  churches  are  free  and  open  churches. 

And  those  parishes,  against  which  the  charge  of 
wealth,  fashion  and  exclusion  might  be  brought,  are 
spending  their  wealth  most  freely  in  works  of  charitj^ 
and  devotion. 

We  think  much  remains  to  be  done  before  we  come 
to  Christian  perfection.  We  cannot  rest  satisfied 
until  "the  poor  are  at  home"  in  all  our  churches. 
But  that  also  is  coming.  In  our  great  cities 
some  of  the  strongest  churches  are  the  homes  of  the 
poor. 

And  may  we  not  think  it  providential  that  we  have 
in  our  communion  so  large  a  proportion  of  this  world's 


—19— 

wealth  ?  Does  not  God  mean  that  wealth  to  be  con- 
secrated by  us  to  spiritual  uses  ? 

As  we  preach  the  doctrine  of  Christ  more  perfectly  ; 
as  through  the  operation  of  our  ministry,  the  influ- 
ence of  our  worship,  the  power  of  our  doctrine,  men 
and  women  become  more  and  more  devoted  to  Christ ; 
then  will  they  come  again  and  lay  the  price  of  their 
possessions  at  the  feet  of  the  apostles. 

This  is  not  simply  a  prophecy,  it  is  a  measure,  a 
fact. 

Already  we  are  beginning  to  feel  the  first  drops  of 
that  refreshing  rain  which  God  is  about  to  send  upon 
his  inheritance  "  when  it  is  weary." 

Never  have  more  princely  gifts  been  given  to  God 
and  to  humanity  than  have  been  given  by  christians 
of  our  times  and  by  churchmen  and  churchwomen. 

Not  only  do  men  and  women  give  their  property, 
they  give  themselves  ;  men  and  women  are  follow- 
ing the  lyord  Jesus  ;  as  He  left  His  heavenly  home 
and  came  to  keep  company  with  sinners,  so  these 
have  left  their  earthly  homes  of  ease  and  luxury  to 
live  with  and  for  the  poor,  keeping  company  with 
them. 

And  here  is  our  opportunity.  Now  is  the  time  for 
the  bishops  and  the  priests  of  the  Church  to  show 
themselves  the  very  first  in  this  movement  to  bring 
in  a  higher  and  a  better  form  of  Christian  life  than 
the  world  has  ever  seen  before. 

It  is  for  us  to  lay  aside  all  thought  of  worldly  great- 
ness or  social  pre-eminence,  to  be  seen  and  known  as 
simple  men,  brothers  among  brethren,  ourselves  the 
equals  of  all  men,  greater  than  the  greatest,  less  than 
the  least. 

If  we  are  not  careful,  the  people  will  go  before  us 
in  this  great  movement  to  bring  in  the  kingdom  of 
God. 


— 20 — 

It  is  because  I  believe  we  are  at  the  turning  of  the 
tide  that  I  am  so  anxious  that  we  be  ready  to  take 
it  at  the  flood. 

The  forces  that  have  made  the  world  what  it  is  are 
spent.  The  desire  for  division  is  now  giving  place  to 
a  longing  for  unity.  Worldly  wealth  is  ready  to 
devote  itself  to  sacred  uses,  and  a  knowledge  of  nature 
is  seeking  for  a  higher  synthesis  in  a  knowledge  of 
God. 

And  this  Church  of  ours,  with  its  history  and  its 
heritage,  may,  if  it  will,  lead  this  movement  and  guide 
it  to  a  happy  and  a  prosperous  conclusion. 

And  it  is  for  this  I  plead.  I  want  this  Church  to 
be  at  once  what  it  claims  to  be,  the  Church  of  the 
people,  not  waiting  for  the  people  to  come  to  it,  but 
going  itself  to  the  people. 

And  if  any  man  ask  who  I  am,  you  may  answer  : 
"I  am  a  voice  crying  in  the  Wilderness,  prepare  ye 
the  way  of  the  lyord." 

And  I  ask  of  you  who  have  stood  so  long  and  so 
bravely  in  the  forefront  of  this  movement,  and  who 
are  now  so  near  to  your  rest  and  your  reward,  to  pray 
for  us,  that  we  may  go  on  with  the  work,  and  be  as 
brave  and  strong  and  devoted  in  our  day  and  gener- 
ation as  you  have  been  in  yours. 

Assuring  you  of  my  reverent  affection,  I  remain 

Yours  in  Christ  Jesus, 
ALGERNON  SIDNEY  CRAPSEY. 


BOOK  FIRST. 

AN   INTERPRETATION 

OF  THE  QUADRILATERAL 

A    SCHEME    FOR    THE  REUNION  OF  THE  CHURCH  OFFERED  BY    THE 

BISHOPS  OF  THE   ANGIvO-AMERICAN  EPISCOPATE  TO  THE 

VARIOUS   COMMUNIONS  OF   CHRISTENDOM, 

BEING  A   LECTURE 


DEI^IVERED   BEFORE  THE  CONNECTICUT    CHURCH    CLUB    IN    TRINITY 
CHURCH,    NEW   HAVEN,    FEBRUARY    1 7,    1 897. 


CONTENTS. 

Page 

Chapter  I. 

The  Problem  of  the  Church, 23 

Chapter  II. 

The  Voice  of  God,    .        .        .     * 35 

Chapter  III. 

The  Faithful  in  Christ  Jesus, 48 

Chapter  IV. 

The  Power  of  Holiness, 61 

Chapter  V. 

The  Strength  of  Brotherhood, 75 


The  I^ecturer  desires  to  acknowledge  the  courtesy 
of  the  Connecticut  Church  Club  for  the  permission  to 
use  this  lyccture  in  this  book. 


NOTE. 

Lest  he  should  be  misunderstood,  the  writer  of  the  Lecture  desires 
to  reaffirm  the  vows  which  he  made  at  the  time  of  his  ordination. 

He  professes  his  beHef  in  the  inspiration  (not  necessarily  in  the 
infallibility)  of  the  Holy  Scriptures,  and  holds  them  to  be  the  Word 
of  God. 

He  professes  his  belief,  explicit  and  implicit,  in  the  Apostles'  and 
Nicene  Creeds  as  setting  forth  in  language,  the  best  that  man  can 
speak,  the  truth  as  it  is  in  Jesus. 

He  professes  his  use  and  veneration  of  the  Sacraments  as  the  means 
of  union  between  the  soul  and  God. 

He  is  ready,  confessing  past  failure,  to  follow,  with  a  glad  mind,  the 
Bishops  and  others  who  are  set  over  him  in  the  Lord. 

But  he  begs  also  to  affirm,  as  the  strongest  conviction  of  his  soul, 
that  Scriptural  inspiration  wdthout  personal  inspiration,  that  intel- 
lectual creed  without  faithfulness  of  heart,  that  sacraments  without 
holiness,  and  episcopates  without  oversight  are  but  dead  and  useless 
things  that  hinder  the  work  of  the  Spirit  of  God  in  the  Soul  of  Man. 


THE  QUADRILATERAL. 


CHAPTER  I. 

THE    PROBLEM    OF   THE    CHURCH. 

It  is  with  gratitude,  gentlemen  of  the  Connecti- 
cut Churcli  Club,  that  I  come  to  speak  before  you 
this  night. 

Your  kindness  has  given  me  a  time  and  a  place 
when  I  may,  with  propriety,  give  expression  to  a 
thought  and  a  feeling  which  it  has  long  been  in  my 
heart  to  utter.  What  I  have  to  say  will,  I  trust,  not 
only  interest  3'OU,  who  are  called  laymen,  and  all 
faithful  men  and  women  who,  like  you,  have  the 
welfare  of  the  Church  of  God  at  heart,  but  I  hope 
also  to  gain  the  ear  of  men  who,  like  myself,  are 
priests  of  God  and  ministers  of  His  Word  and 
Sacraments. 

And  I  have  a  wish  even  more  daring  than  this. 
In  all  humility  and  as  one  speaking  under  correc- 
tion, I  address  my  words  more  especially  to  the 
Bishops  of  the  Anglo-American  Communion,  who 
are  soon  to  assemble  in  Synod  under  the  presi- 
dency of  the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury  to  take 
counsel  concerning  the  spiritual  interests  of  the 
English-speaking  race. 

It  is  to  the  honor  of  that  Episcopate  that  it  has 


2^  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

seen  a  great  evil  in  the  present  state  of  Christen- 
dom and  has  offered  a  remedy  for  that  evil. 

The  Bnglish  Communion  is  the  only  Commu- 
nion of  Christians  that  has  laid  seriously  to  heart 
"  our  unhappy  divisions,"  and  the  Anglo-American 
Episcopate  is  the  only  influential  body  of  men  that 
has  made  any  definite  proposal,  having  for  its  end 
the  re-establishment  of  the  peace  of  the  Church. 

It  is  of  that  proposal  that  I  wish  to  speak  to  you 
to-night,  and  through  you  to  the  great  body  of  men 
with  whom  that  proposal  originated,  and  who  are 
most  deeply  interested  in  its  acceptance  by  the 
Christian  world. 

What  I  shall  have  to  offer  will  be  in  the  way  of 
interpretation,  I  shall  endeavor  to  make  clear  to 
all  men  the  terms  of  that  treaty  which  our  fathers 
have  offered  to  a  divided  and  suffering  Christendom. 
And  I  will  try  to  show  our  Fathers  that  if  they  will 
themselves  hold  and  live  the  terms  of  their  treaty, 
the  peace  of  the  Church  will  follow  as  a  necessary 
consequence  of  their  thought  and  action. 

That  the  evil  which  the  Bishops  deplore  is  a  real 
evil  nobody  can  deny. 

Except  the  personal  immorality  of  Christian  men 
and  women  there  is  nothing  which  so  hinders  the 
spread  of  the  gospel  and  the  growth  of  the  king- 
dom of  God  as  the  present  distracted  state  of  the 
Christian  Church.  Christendom  to-day  is  a  house 
divided  against  itself;  the  City  of  God  is  rent 
by  factions ;  the  forces  of  the  kingdom  are  wasted 
in  internecine  strife. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  25 

This  warfare  of  Christians  among  themselves  is 
the  stumbling-block  in  the  way  of  all  progress ; 
the  ever-present  scandal  that  gives  assurance  to  the 
unbeliever  and  grieves  the  heart  of  the  faithful. 
It  is  an  argument  hard  to  meet  against  the  truth  of 
our  holy  religion.  It  is  a  deadly  sin  against  the 
fundamental  law  of  the  Christian  life ;  the  law  of 
love.  It  is,  as  long  as  it  lasts,  a  denial  of  God,  a 
dishonor  to  Christ,  a  rejection  of  His  Holy  Word. 
It  is  one  of  the  baleful  effects  of  that  hardness  of 
the  human  heart  which  does  so  much  to  kill  the 
joy  and  wither  the  hope  of  human  life. 

Nothing  but  custom  and  use,  which  reconciles  at 
last  to  every  present  evil,  could  lead  us  to  endure  a 
sight  which  is  seen  in  any  American  village  on 
any  Sabbath  day. 

We  see  the  people  of  that  village,  who  all  the 
week  long  have  lived  in  perfect  love  and  peace 
together ;  who  in  all  social  and  business  relations 
are  a  united  people,  working  together  for  common 
ends ;  we  see  them,  I  say,  coming  forth  on  Sun- 
day morning  from  their  houses  to  attend  upon  the 
public  worship  of  God. 

They  walk  side  by  side  until  they  come  to  the 
public  square,  and  then  instead  of  going  on  as  one 
great  force  of  life  into  a  common  house  of  wor- 
ship, to  oiler  a  united  act  of  praise,  they  separate 
at  their  church  doors,  and,  without  force  and  power, 
dribble  off  a  dozen  insignificant  companies  into  a 
dozen  desolate,  half-empty  buildings.  And  in  these 
dreary    places    of    so-called  worship    the    meagre 


26  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

members  sit,  Sunday  after  Sunday,  vainly  striving 
to  blow  tbe  gray  ashes  of  a  dead  schism  into  some 
faint  and  feeble  glow  of  life. 

In  this  village  there  can  be  no  noble  worship  of 
God,  no  true  and  loving  work  for  man.  The  whole 
force  of  Christianity  is  spent  in  the  maintenance 
of  a  dozen  outward  forms  of  worship,  for  the  most 
part  so  nearly  alike  that  the  closest  observer  can 
hardly  tell  them  apart ;  and  forms  of  worship  in 
themselves  so  scant  and  mean  that  they  starve  the 
soul  of  their  devotees  with  spiritual  cold  and  hun- 
ger. To  keep  alive  their  wretched  differences 
Christian  people  sacrifice  every  power  they  have  to 
do  good  to  man,  every  possibility  of  glorifying  God. 

And  when  we  turn  from  the  village  to  the  city, 
the  sight  is  not  more  reassuring  to  the  Christian 
observer.  In  the  village  the  church  accommodation 
is  ten  times  too  great  for  the  people,  in  the  city  it  is 
apt  to  be  ten  times  too  little.  Vast  sections  of  our 
great  cities,  where  hundreds  of  thousands  of  men 
and  women  and  children  live  and  die,  are  as  nearly 
devoid  of  any  opportunity  for  Christian  worship, 
as  nearly  desolate  of  the  consolations  and  helps 
of  the  Christian  religion,  as  if  they  were  in  the 
heart  of  the  African  desert. 

The  expense  consequent  upon  the  support  of  a 
dozen  forms  of  Christian  polity  ;  the  confusion  and 
cross  purposes  entailed  by  a  dozen  independent 
organizations  doing  the  same  kind  of  work  in  the 
same  field,  prevent  anything  like  a  wise  ordering 
to  produce  an  efficient  result. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  2y 

The  necessity  of  securing  material  support  leads 
the  various  denominations  to  plant  their  best 
churches  among  the  wealthy  and  the  well-to-do, 
so  that  in  such  regions  we  have  the  same  conges- 
tion that  we  find  in  the  village :  a  dozen  churches 
where  one  is  enough. 

The  Christian  churches,  at  least  the  Protestant 
churches,  seem  no  longer  to  be  with  Christ  our  God 
in  the  Ark  of  Salvation,  going  out  over  the  waters 
of  life  seeking  to  save  the  clean  and  the  unclean  ; 
but  they  seem  to  be  in  the  ship  Argo  under  the 
lead  of  Jason,  sailing  forever  toward  the  setting 
sun,  in  search  of  the  golden  fleece. 

And  when  we  turn  from  the  work  of  the  Church 
in  Christian  lands  to  the  work  of  the  Church  in 
heathen  lands,  we  behold  a  sight  even  more  dis- 
tressing. 

Not  content  with  airing  our  quarrels  among  our- 
selves, we  must  carry  them  abroad  to  scandalize  the 
heathen. 

Future  ages  will,  I  think,  see  in  this  fact,  more 
than  in  any  other,  the  crudeness  of  our  Christian 
intelligence ;  the  coldness  of  our  Christian  love. 
They  will  wonder  why  we  did  not  see  the  folly  of 
trying  to  teach  others  a  doArine,  which  after  years 
of  instruction,  we  ourselves  did  not  seem  to  com- 
prehend with  sufficient  clearness  to  be  able  to  agree 
among  ourselves  as  to  what  that  doctrine  really 
was. 

They  will  marvel  also  that  we  should  try  to  lead 
others  into  a  way  of  life,  which  we  ourselves   did 


28  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

not  follow,  a  way  of  life  which  we  all  professed  to 
consider  very  true  and  very  beautiful,  but  which  we 
held  also  to  be  very  unwise  and  very  unpractical. 

They  will  wonder  why  it  did  not  occur  to  us  to 
say  "  Physician,  heal  thyself,"* 

They  will  wonder,  not  so  much  at  our  wickedness 
as  at  our  stupidity,  when  they  see  us  taking  our 
quarrels,  out  of  which  all  anger  is  gone ;  quarrels 
that  no  longer  separate  man  from  man  in  the  ordi- 
nary affairs  of  life ;  quarrels  of  which  the  great 
majority  have  utterly  forgotten  the  cause  and  the 
occasion ;  quarrels  that  no  one  considers  it  worth 
while  any  longer  to  quarrel  about ;  and  carrying 
these  with  us,  to  hinder  our  work  as  we  go  forth  to 
preach  the  gospel  to  the  heathen. 

Our  children  will  be  astonished  that  we  should 
have  tried  to  convert  men  to  the  love  of  God,  by 
showing  to  them  the  hatreds  of  men. 

Is  it  not  an  awful  fact  that  the  Christian  world  is 
to-day  spending  millions  of  treasure  to  sow  the 
seeds  of  Christian  discord  in  heathen  lands  ? 

Hvery  denomination  is  carrying  in  its  hand  not 
the  great  Chrism  of  the  Lord,  but  some  paltry  ism  of 
its  own.  "  Compassing  seas  and  land  to  make  one 
proselyte,  and  when  he  is  made,  making  him  two- 
fold more  the  child  of  hell  than  themselves,  "f 

This  evil  cry  of  the  Church  has  reached  the 
ears  of  the  Fathers  of  the  Anglo-American  Com- 
munion, and  they  have  tried  to  answer  that  cry  and 
to  deliver  the  Church  out  of  her  distress. 

*  S.  Luke  iv,  23.  t  S.  Matthew,  xxiii,  15. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  2^ 

From  the  very  first  there  has  been  in  the  heart 
of  the  Anglican  Church  a  yearning  for  unity. 

When  in  the  course  of  Divine  Providence  the 
Knglish  nation  annulled  the  jurisdiction  of  the 
Bishop  of  Rome  within  the  limits  of  the  king- 
dom, and  the  English  Church  adjusted  herself  to 
the  new  conditions,  the  adjustment  was  not  made 
upon  lines  of  exclusion  but  upon  lines  of  compre- 
hension. 

The  English  Church  is  the  great  compromise. 
She  holds  fast  with  one  hand  her  ancient,  catholic 
polity,  faith  and  worship,  Avhile  with  the  other  she 
grasps  modem  post-reformation  thought  and  life. 

At  her  capacious  bosom  she  has  always  nursed  her 
twin  schools  of  thought,  her  school  of  veneration 
and  her  school  of  penetration. 

While  unwisely  at  times  trying  to  compel  men  to 
stay  in  her  communion,  she  has  never  cast  out  a 
single  soul.  Her  separation  from  the  churches  of 
the  Continent  has  alwaj^s  been  a  pain  and  grief  to 
her. 

Having,  then,  as  her  very  heart's  blood  this  long- 
ing for  unity,  it  was  natural  that  she  should  be 
the  first  to  propose  a  plan  for  the  reconciliation  of 
the  Church ;  the  first  to  hold  out  an  olive  branch 
to  offended  and  alienated  brethren. 

The  plan  of  reunion  which  has  been  devised  by 
the  Bishops,  has  in  view  modem  Protestant  Chris- 
tendom, rather  than  the  ancient  churches  of  Greece 
and  Rome. 

And  as  it  is  Protestant  Christendom  that  is  most 


JO  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

sadly  divided,  so  it  is  Protestant  Christendom  that 
most  sadly  needs  unification. 

The  scheme  of  the  Anglo-American  Episcopate 
for  the  readjustment  of  the  Church  is  known  as 
the  Quadrilateral.  It  consists  of  four  propositions. 
The  Anglo-American  Church  offers  perfect  peace 
and  full  communion  to  all  who  will  accept  the 
Scriptures  of  the  Old  and  New  Testament  as  the 
Revealed  word  of  God  ;  who  will  profess  the  Nicene 
Creed  as  the  essential  faith ;  who  will  receive  the 
two  Sacraments  ordained  by  Christ,  and  who  will 
submit  to  the  Historic  Episcopate  locally  adapted 
to  different  Christian  nations. 

I  am  not  at  this  time  concerned  with  the  history 
of  the  Quadrilateral.  That  can  be  read  in  the  New 
York  Church  Club  lectures  of  1895  and  in  the 
Union  Theological  Seminary  le(?tures  of  1896. 

What  I  am  concerned  with  is  not  the  history  but 
the  present  status  of  the  Quadrilateral. 

I  wish  to  call  the  attention  of  the  Bishops  to  the 
remarkable  fact  that  this  proposition  has  been 
before  the  world  for  more  than  ten  years,  and  yet 
it  is  not  so  much  as  known  by  the  great  mass 
of  Churchmen,  not  to  say  the  great  mass  of 
Christians.  It  has  been  discussed  by  scholars  and 
by  doctors.  The  people  have  never  heard  of  it.  It 
has  sent  no  thrill  of  hope  to  a  sect-ridden,  sect- 
weary  nation. 

And  I  venture  the  prediction  that  if  it  were  read 
by  proclamation  in  the  squares  of  every  city,  on  the 
green  of  every  village  and  at  every  cross-road,  it 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  31 

would  attract  hardly  a  passing  thought,  rouse  hardly 
a  passing  emotion. 

The  people  would  see  in  it  no  prospect  of  better 
things.  In  spite  of  all  protests  to  the  contrary,  the 
plain  common  sense  of  men  would  think  it  a  scheme 
to  make  everybody  an  Episcopalian,  and  as  things 
are  now  they  would  see  no  particular  reason  for 
that.  So  the  heart  of  the  people  is  and  will  be 
forever  cold  to  such  a  proposition. 

But  the  heart  of  the  people  is  the  test  of  truth. 
What  does  not  reach  and  move  that  heart  must  have 
in  it  some  fatal  weakness. 

And  if  the  Bishops  will  pardon  me,  I  will  make 
bold  to  tell  them  that  their  plan  is  not  effective 
and  never  can  be  effective,  because  it  is  based  upon 
a  fundamental  error  in  thought.  The  Bishops  have 
mistaken  effects  for  causes. 

The  error  was  a  simple  and  natural  error.  Look- 
ing back  at  that  wonderful  creation  of  God,  the 
Holy  Catholic  Church,  as  she  was  in  the  days  of 
her  separation,  her  purity  and  her  strength  ;  behold- 
ing her  as  she  comes  forth  from  her  obscurity  into 
the  clear  light  of  history,  seeing  her  in  the  dawn 
of  her  new  life,  as  "  she  looketh  forth  as  the  morn- 
ing ;  fair  as  the  moon,  clear  as  the  sun,  terrible  as 
an  army  with  banners,"*  we  see  her  as  she  goes 
into  all  lands,  reading  out  of  the  Holy  Scriptures  for 
the  edification  of  her  people,  reciting  her  great 
creed,  professing  an  unfaltering  faith  in  God  the 
Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Ghost,  washing  her   chil- 

*  Solomon's  Song,  vi,  10. 
3 


32  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

dren  in  tlie  waters  of  Baptism  for  the  remission  of 
their  sins  and  feeding  them  with  the  Body  and 
Blood  of  the  Lord ;  as  we  see  the  people  ever3rwhere 
under  the  eye  of  the  Bishop  and  guided  by  that 
eye,  we  think  naturally  that  we  have  here  the 
secret  of  the  Church's  unity. 

It  was  Her  Scriptures,  Her  Creed,  Her  Sacra- 
ments, Her  Bishops  that  made  her  one. 

And  here,  if  I  mistake  not,  is  the  error  that 
vitiates  all  our  reasoning. 

These  are  not  the  causes  of  the  Church's  unity, 
they  are  the  consequences  of  that  unity.  They  are 
not  the  Church's  life,  they  are  simply  the  organs 
of  that  life. 

The  organs  of  a  man's  body,  his  head,  his  hands, 
his  feet,  are  not  the  causes  of  the  unity  of  a  man's 
body,  they  are  the  effects  of  that  unity.  The  unity 
of  the  body  is  the  effect  of  something  infinitely 
greater  than  these. 

It  is  the  mysterious  aw^ul  life-principle  which 
builds  up  the  body,  differentiates  the  organs  and 
makes  them  the  instruments  by  which  it  works  its 
will  in  the  world. 

So  the  unity  of  the  Church  is  created  not  by  the 
Scriptures,  nor  by  the  Creed,  nor  by  the  Sacra- 
ments, nor  by  the  Bpiscopate,  nor  by  all  these 
together ;  but  by  the  great  life-principle  of  the 
Church,  which  is  passionate  love  and  devotion  to 
God  through  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord.  It  is  this  life- 
principle  of  the  Church  that  builds  up  the  body, 
differentiates  its  organs  of  Scripture,  of  Creed,  of 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  jj 

Sacrament  aud  of  Episcopate,  and  makes  these  the 
instruments  by  which  it  works  its  will  in  the  world. 

Now  these  organs  are  connected  with  the  Body 
of  Christ  by  a  most  beautiful  and  delicate  spiritual 
mechanism.  And  it  is  man's  violation  of  that  con- 
nection, his  meddling  with  that  mechanism  which 
is  the  cause  of  all  our  woes. 

The  Quadrilateral  of  the  Bishops  has  no  inde- 
pendent existence.  Neither  it  nor  any  proposition 
of  it  can  be  offered  to  man  for  his  acceptance. 

The  Quadrilateral  rests  in  and  derives  all  its 
force  from  somewhat  greater  than  itself.  The 
basis  of  the  four  propositions  of  the  Bishops  is 
found  in  four  words  of  S.  Paul. 

As  the  life-principle  of  a  man  manifests  itself 
variously  in  his  various  organs,  his  intelligence  in 
his  head,  his  affection  in  his  heart,  his  skill  in  his 
hands,  his  motion  in  his  feet ;  so  in  the  Church 
there  is  a  four-fold  manifestation  of  the  one  great 
life-power.  It  is  this  that  gives  a  four-fold  charac- 
ter to  the  Christian  life. 

This  manifestation  of  the  Spirit  was  so  clear  and 
strong  that  it  gave  to  the  early  Christian  a  four- 
fold name.  He  did  not  call  himself  a  Christian  at 
the  first ;  that  name  came  to  him  from  without. 
If  asked  concerning  himself,  who  and  what  he 
was,  he  would  have  answered,  I  am  of  the  called, 
I  am  of  the  faithful,  I  am  of  the  saints  or  holy 
ones,  I  am  of  the  brethren. 

When  S.  Paul  addresses  the  Christian  churches 
he  uses  this  four-fold  name.     He  speaks  of  them  as 


j^  A    Voice  in  the   Wilder )iess. 

the  k\7]toI,  as  the  wiarol  and  as  the  d<ylol  and  as  the 
aS€\(f)oi  and  it  is  this  four-fold  manifestation  of  the 
Spirit  of  God  in  the  soul  of  man  which  has  been  the 
creative  energy  that  has  constructed  the  organs  of 
the  Church's  life  in  the  world. 

Out  of  the  force  that  makes  men  KkrjTol  or  called 
comes  all  scriptures. 

Out  of  the  force  that  makes  men  iriarot  or  faith- 
ful comes  all  creeds. 

Out  of  the  force  that  makes  men  d^iol  or  holy 
comes  all  sacraments. 

Out  of  the  force  that  makes  men  aSeXtj^ol  or 
brethren  comes  all  episcopates. 

And  now  let  us  put  off  our  shoes  from  off  our 
feet,  for  the  place  whereon  we  stand  is  holy  ground. 
And  let  us  reverently  examine  these  inward  prin- 
ciples in  relation  to  their  outward  manifestations. 


CHAPTER   II. 

THE   VOICE    OF    GOD. 

In  writing  his  letter  to  the  Romans,  S.  Paul 
addresses  them  as  the  KXtitol  ;  those  who  were 
called.  He  speaks  to  the  men  and  women  in 
Rome  who  had  heard  the  Voice  of  God. 

It  was  natural  that  S.  Paul  should  think  first  of 
all  of  this  fact  of  their  calling,  for  he  himself  had 
been  called  of  God.  He  remembered  a  certain  day 
in  his  life  when  he  had  heard  a  Voice  speaking 
unto  him  in  the  Hebrew  tongue,  and  saying  unto 
him  "  Saul,  Saul,  why  persecutest  thou  me  ?"  "' 

And  that  day  the  hol}^  Apostle  considers  ever 
afterward  as  his  birthday ;  the  day  when  he  was 
new  born  unto  God.  The  Voice  from  heaven 
speaking  in  his  soul  called  him  out  of  darkness 
into  the  light  of  the  glory  of  God  in  the  face  of 
Jesus  Christ. 

The  conversion  of  S.  Paul  is  so  perfect  an  in- 
stance of  the  true  relation  between  the  Voice  of 
God  speaking  in  the  soul  and  the  outward  written 
Word  as  it  is  read  in  the  churches,  that  it  will  be 
well  for  us  to  dwell  for  a  moment  upon  that  remark- 
able and  important  event. 

S.  Paul  from  his  youth  up  had  been  learned  in 
the  Scriptures.  He  had  not  only  read  them,  he 
had  studied  them.  He  had  gone  to  the  most 
famous  teachers  of  his   day  that  he  might  learn 

*  Acts  of  Apostles,  xxvi,  14. 


j6  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

from  them  tlie  interpretation  of  these  oracles  of 
God.  But  for  all  this  S.  Paul  was  not  satisfied. 
His  heart  was  yearning  after  a  truth  which  he 
could  not  find  in  the  written  Word.  He  went  to 
Jerusalem  and  sat  at  the  feet  of  Gamaliel ;  but  this 
wise  master  in  Israel  could  not  take  away  the  vail 
that  was  upon  the  face  of  the  Scripture.  He  only 
obscured  the  Scripture  with  endless  comment.  He 
could  give  the  young  man  from  Tarsus  nothing  to 
help  him  to  a  better  knowledge  of  the  law  of  God. 
He  could  only  tell  him  what  Hillel  had  said  and 
what  Zadok  had  said.  It  was  the  voice  of  man  and 
not  the  Voice  of  God  which  was  heard  in  that  school. 

With  such  husks  as  these  the  ardent  soul  of 
Saul  had  to  be  satisfied.  He  adopted  the  doctrines 
of  his  teachers  and  gave  to  them  the  passionate 
devotion  of  his  loyal  nature. 

For  their  sake  he  did  violence  to  the  natural 
tenderness  of  his  heart,  and  became  a  persecutor  of 
his  brethren,  haling  them  to  prison  and  consenting 
unto  their  death. 

But  all  the  while  his  soul  was  uneasy ;  his  con- 
science was  kicking  against  the  pricks. 

At  last  God  had  pity  on  him  and  spoke  to  his 
bewildered  spirit,  directly  from  heaven. 

When  S.  Paul  heard  that  Voice  in  his  soul 
speaking  to  him,  he  was  converted  to  the  truth. 
That  Voice  was  the  truth  itself,  making  known  to 
him  the  meaning  of  the  Scriptures :  revealing  to 
him  mysteries  which  had  been  hid  from  the  founda- 
tion of  the  world. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  jy 

S.  Paul  had  at  last  found  his  teacher.  It  was 
God  Himself.  God,  who  in  time  past  had  spoken 
to  the  prophets,  had  now  spoken  to  him.  God  was 
not  only  speaking  to  him,  but  through  him  and  by 
him.     Saul  also  was  among  the  prophets. 

There  is  a  very  interesting  psychological  fa(5l 
brought  out  in  this  history  of  the  conversion  of 
S.  Paul.  He  tells  us  that  this  Voice  spake  unto 
him  in  the  Hebrew  tongue. 

Now  S.  Paul  was  by  culture  a  Greek.  The 
Greek  language  was  the  language  of  his  ordinary 
conversation  and  of  his  ordinary  thought.  When 
he  had  occasion  to  write  he  wrote  in  Greek. 

But  in  this  hour  of  supreme  emotion  he  did  not 
hear  the  language  which  he  had  acquired  in  the 
schools  ;  he  heard  the  language  which  he  had  in- 
herited from  his  fathers.  It  was  not  the  speech  of 
the  market  and  the  court ;  it  was  the  speech  of 
the  temple  and  the  place  of  prayer.  His  religious 
experience  found  expression  in  the  language  of 
religion. 

It  was  that  great  race  language  which  for  all 
practical  purposes  had  been  forgotten ;  which  was 
not  heard  in  the  street :  a  tongue  which  had  been 
mute  for  four  hundred  years ;  which  spake  out  of 
its  living  past  to  the  soul  of  this  bewildered  man 
in  his  living  present. 

Is  this  not  a  beautiful  psychological  fact  ?  show- 
ing us  that  the  soul  of  man  is  full  of  hidden  treas- 
ure ;  not  only  is  his  own  individual  past  laid  up  in 
store  for  him,  but  the  past  also  of  his  family,  of  his 


J 8  A    Voice  in  the   WtlderJicss, 

race,  of  humanity,  of  all  the  creation,  is  hidden 
away  in  his  nature  to  be  called  out  into  living 
activity  when  occasion  conies. 

This  fact  in  the  life  of  S.  Paul  is  an  instance 
of  that  wonderful  law  of  continuity  which  runs 
through  all  the  works  of  God. 

It  was  no  new  thing  for  God  to  speak  in  the 
Hebrew  tongue.  He  had  been  speaking  in  that 
tongue  for  more  than  two  thousand  years. 

The  Hebrew  people  were  separated  from  all  the 
people  of  the  earth  because  they  were  a  God-hear- 
ing people.  Their  nation  owed  its  separate  exis- 
tence to  the  Voice  of  God. 

Abraham,  the  Hebrew,  heard  the  Voice  of  God 
calling  to  him  and  saying,  "  Get  thee  out  from  thy 
country  and  from  thy  kindred,  and  from  thy  father's 
house  unto  a  land  that  I  will  show  thee  of."* 

And  when  Abraham  heard  that  Voice  and  fol- 
lowed it,  then  the  Hebrew  people  began  to  be. 
God  spake  and  they  were  made ;  He  commanded 
and  they  were  created.f 

And  all  through  their  history  the  Hebrew  people 
were  accustomed  to  the  Voice  of  God.  He  was 
speaking  to  them  every  day.  That  Voice  was  the 
guide  of  their  lives  in  all  things  great  and  small ; 
it  told  them  how  to  feed  their  sheep  and  how  to 
teach  their  children ;  it  told  them  how  to  build 
their  temples  and  how  to  wash  their  kettles. 

This  Voice  of  God  speaking  to  the  soul  of  the 
Hebrew  is  the  source  of  all  that  we  call  Scripture. 

*  Genesis  xii,  i.  t  Psalms  cxlviii,  5. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  jg 

God  spoke  to  His  servants,  the  prophets,  and  the 
prophets  told  what  God  had  said  to  them  in  the 
ears  of  all  the  people,  and  then  some  scribe  wrote 
at  the  mouth  of  the  prophet  all  the  words  which 
God  had  given  him,  and  so  those  wonderful  books 
which  \ve  call  Scripture  came  into  existence/'' 

The  part  which  the  Hebrews  have  played  in  the 
religious  history  of  mankind  has  been  the  cause  of 
great  good  and  of  some  evil. 

Because  the  Hebrew  heard  the  Voice  of  God  so 
constantl}^  and  so  clearly,  the  impression  has  gone 
abroad  that  God  does  not  know  any  other  language. 
]Men  think  he  can  only  speak  in  the  Hebrew  tongue. 

This  belief  found  a  fantastic  expression  in  the 
opinion  of  some  scholars  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury, that  Hebrew  was  the  original  language  of 
mankind.  It  was  that  which  Adam  heard,  when 
he  heard  the  Voice  of  the  Lord  God  "  walking  in 
the  garden  in  the  cool  of  the  day."'}"  We  know 
now  that  this  is  a  fond  belief.  We  know  that  the 
Hebrew  is  not  an  original  language ;  it  is  onl}^  a 
minor  stem  on  the  great  Semitic  branch. 

But  this  opinion  shows  how  profoundl}^  the 
Hebrew  and  early  Christian  writings  have  im- 
pressed the  mind.  So  full  are  they  of  the  God- 
hearing  quality,  that  distinguishing  mark  of  the 
Hebrew  people,  that  men  say  they  are  the  ver}^ 
Word  of  God,  ascribe  to  them  the  infallibilit}^  of 
God,  and  clothe  their  very  signs  and  sentences 
with  unapproachable  divinity. 

*  Jeremiah  xlv,  i.  t  Genesis  iii,  8. 


/fo  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderjiess. 

Now  no  one  can  overestimate  the  influence  of 
tlie  Holy  Scriptures.  They  are  woven  witli  the 
very  warp  and  woof  of  the  life  of  civilized  human- 
ity. 

They  are  the  source  of  much  that  is  best  and 
noblest  in  that  life.  They  tell  us  of  all  the  won- 
derful works  of  God,  of  His  wisdom,  of  His  power, 
of  His  love. 

But  if  we  separate  the  Scripture  from  the  living 
voice  of  God  speaking  in  the  living  soul  of  man, 
then  we  cut  the  Scriptures  off  from  the  true  source 
of  their  life. 

If  we  are  so  lame  in  our  reasoning  as  to  say  be- 
cause God  has  spoken,  therefore  God  cannot  speak  ; 
if  we  think  His  voice  is  no  longer  a  voice  but  only 
a  Written  Word,  then  the  Scriptures  will  be  to  us 
nothing  but  Scriptures  ;  so  many  written  books  of 
which  we  may  and  must  at  last  judge  the  value. 

Cutting  them  off  from  their  vital  connection  with 
the  soul-life  of  man,  we  throw  them  into  the  arena 
of  discussion,  the  prey  of  the  higher  and  the  lower 
criticism  ;  the  powerful  cause  not  of  concord,  but  of 
discord  ;  not  of  unity,  but  of  dissension. 

And  this  is  just  what  Modern  Protestant  Chris- 
tianity has  done.  It  has  founded  its  religion  upon 
a  book  and  then  upon  the  interpretation  of  a  book, 
so  that  sects  have  multiplied  between  the  leaves  of 
the  Bible  as  maggots  multiply  within  the  rind  of 
a  cheese. 

What  then?  Shall  we  cast  the  Bible  away? 
God  forbid ;  but  we  must  use  the  Bible  in  living 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  41 

union  with  the  soul  of  man  and  with  the  life  of 
the  Church. 

We  must  remember  that  Bibles,  wonderful  as 
they  are,  are  still  the  work  of  men.  IMen  wrote 
them  out  of  the  fullness  of  that  revelation  Avhich 
God  made  to  them  of  Himself  in  the  secret  places 
of  their  hearts. 

And  what  men  have  done  men  may  do.  If  men 
heard  the  Voice  of  God  a  thousand  years  ago  we 
must  believe  that  men  can  hear  that  Voice  to-day. 
And  we  must  see  to  it  that  men  do  hear  it.  Bach 
man  must  hear  that  Voice  for  himself.  Bach  gen- 
eration must  hear.  That  Voice  must  speak  to  us 
as  it  spoke  to  Abraham,  to  Isaac  and  to  Jacob.  We 
must  hear  it  as  Saul  of  Tarsus  heard  it,  if  not  in 
the  Hebrew  tongue,  yet  in  our  dear  Bnglish 
tongue,  which,  next  to  the  Hebrew,  is  most  apt  in 
the  utterance  of  religious  thought  and  feeling. 
And  if  we  listen  we  will  hear  that  Voice  crying 
unto  us  and  saying,  not  perhaps  "  Saul,  Saul,  why 
persecutest  thou  me  ?"  for  alas,  we  have  not  zeal 
enough  for  God  to  persecute  anything  or  anybody 
in  His  name ;  but  we  will  hear  that  more  heart- 
broken cry  of  "  Saul,  Saul,  why  neglectest  thou 
me?" 

And  the  great  of&ce  of  the  Christian  Church  and 
of  the  Christian  ministry  is  to  make  the  Voice  of 
God  heard  in  the  world. 

That  Church  and  that  ministry  is  God's  eternal 
prophet  to  proclaim  from  age  to  age  God's  eternal 
truth.     That  Church  and  that  ministry  was  not 


4^  A    Voice  in  tJic   Wilderjiess. 

set  up  in  this  world  to  be  the  reader  of  a  book  ;  it 
is  here  to  be  the  preacher  of  a  life. 

The  Christian  Church,  like  the  Hebrew  nation, 
owes  its  existence  to  the  Voice  of  God.  The  great 
flock  of  Jesus  Christ  came  together  at  the  call  of 
the  Shepherd. 

The  very  name  of  the  Church  speaks  to  us  of 
the  nature  of  its  origin.     It  is  called  by  S.  Paul 

the  eKKXrjaia  rov  6eov. 

This  word  eKK\r)a-La,  means  an  assembly  sum- 
moned by  the  crier.  It  is  from  eKKaXeco,  to  call  out. 
And  as  the  /crjpv^,  or  herald,  went  up  and  down  the 
streets  of  Athens  calling  the  selected  citizens  into 
the  public  assembly,  so  the  icrjpv^^  or  preacher,  went 
up  and  down  the  streets  of  this  world  calling  the 
elect  souls  into  the  assembly,  or  congregation,  of 
God.  He  called  with  the  Voice  of  God,  and  the 
people  of  God  heard  it.  The}^  came  at  that  call,  a 
motley  crowd  indeed  of  halt  and  lame  and  blind. 
Slaves  from  the  market,  gladiators  from  the  arena  ; 
rich  men  weary  of  their  riches  and  poor  men  dying 
in  their  poverty ;  they  came  out  of  the  barrenness 
of  Judaism  and  the  wretchedness  of  heathenism ; 
they  came  at  the  call  of  the  apostles  and  prophets 
of  the  Christian  Church,  as  hungry  doves  come  at 
the  call  of  the  child  that  feeds  them. 

So  came  into  existence  that  wonderful  cKKXtja-ia, 
rov  Oeov,  that  assembly  of  living  souls  called  out  of 
the  world  into  the  kingdom  of  God. 

And  the  Church  owes  its  continued  existence  to 
the  same  cause  that  gave  it  being.     It  is  the  Voice 


A    Voice  i)i  the   Wilderness.  4.J 

of  God  that  gave  it  life  ;  it  is  the  Voice  of  God  that 
gives  it  life. 

If  in  any  age  or  among  any  people  that  Voice  is 
no  longer  heard,  then  the  life  of  the  Chnrch  pines 
and  dies  away. 

In  the  thirteenth  century,  the  Christian  religion 
was  ready  to  perish  in  Europe.  An  ambitious 
hierarchy  had  lost  all  sense  of  the  spirit  world,  in 
its  eagerness  to  grasp  the  power  and  wealth  of  this 
world.  It  had  drowned  the  Voice  of  God  in  the  din 
of  arms.  A  brutal  and  a  sensual  priesthood  per- 
formed the  rites  of  religion  in  a  language  which  it 
did  not  itself  understand.  A  neglected  people  were 
fast  lapsing  into  a  worse  than  heathen  wretched- 
ness. Then  it  was  that  God  raised  up  one  of  the 
sweetest  of  his  prophets  and  the  voice  of  St.  Francis 
of  Assisi,  which  was  the  Voice  of  God,  went  out 
like  the  voice  of  a  flute  calling  men  back  to  the 
knowledge  and  the  love  of  God. 

This  Voice  of  God  can  never  be  disguised  and 
never  imitated.  As  soon  as  you  hear  a  man  speak 
you  can  tell  whether  God  is  in  him  or  not.  There 
was  a  quality  in  the  voice  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ 
that  astonished  and  charmed  the  multitude.  "  He 
spake  as  one  having  power  and  not  as  the 
scribes."* 

If  the  Voice  of  God  is  in  the  heart,  the  mouth  must 
speak  it.  Balaam  the  son  of  Beor  may  try  to  hide 
that  Voice,  so  as  to  please  Balak  the  son  of  Zippor, 
but  in  spite  of  himself  the  words  of  God  ring  out 

*  S.  Matthew  vii,  29. 


/f-zf.  A    Voice  ill  the   Wilder7iess. 

to  his  own  dismay,  and  to  the  dismay  of  the  king 
of  Moab.* 

And  if  a  man  has  not  that  Voice  he  can  never 
assume  it.  Is  it  not  a  painful  fact  that  you  will 
go  into  a  Church  of  God,  and  you  will  hear  a  man 
reading,  as  he  supposes,  the  Word  of  God,  or  you 
will  hear  him  preaching,  as  he  thinks,  the  Gospel 
of  God,  and  yet  in  his  very  tones  and  accents  you 
will  hear  the  hollow  ring  of  death  ?  He  is  that 
saddest  of  all  things  in  God's  creation,  a  hypocrite, 
a  man  who  says  with  his  lips  what  he  does  not 
believe  in  his  heart. 

We  can  tell  the  Voice  of  God  also  because  it  is 
a  simple  voice  and  always  expresses  itself  in  a 
command.  God's  Voice  is  in  the  world  to  call 
men  to  God.  It  commands  men  to  leave  sin  and 
death  and  hell,  and  come  to  holiness  and  life  and 
heaven. 

It  comes  to  Abram  in  Ur  of  the  Chaldees,  where 
all  is  idolatry  and  forgetfulness  of  God,  and  bids 
him  get  out  of  that  country  into  a  land  which 
God  will  show  him  :  it  comes  to  Peter  and  Andrew 
on  the  shores  of  Gennesaret,  and  says  to  them, 
"  follow  me  and  I  will  make  you  fishers  of  men." 

And  if  that  Voice  ever  comes  to  me  on  the  banks 
of  the  Genesee,  or  to  you  here  by  the  waters  of 
New  Haven,  it  will  always  come  as  the  call  to  fol- 
low Jesus,  a  call  to  some  greater  holiness,  to  some 
higher  duty. 

But,  Fathers  in  the  Church  and  brothers  in  the 

*  Numbers  xxii,  ii. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  ^5 

ministry,  we  must  remember  that  the  Voice  of 
God  always  says  come,  never  go.  It  does  not 
point  to  others  "  the  steep  and  thorny  road  to 
heaven,  while  it  the  primrose  path  of  dalliance 
treads."* 

Remember  that  we  are  to  call  men  out  of  the 
world  into  the  Kingdom  of  God.  But  how  can 
we  call  them  out  of  the  world,  when  we  ourselves 
are  still  in  it.  If  the  world  and  its  dignities  is 
still  our  world ;  if  we  aspire  to  the  episcopate 
because  of  its  social  importance,  because  it  makes 
us  equal  to  the  men  of  rank  and  wealth ;  if  we 
use  our  priesthood  not  for  God's  advantage  but 
our  own ;  if  we  are  of  all  worldly  men  the  most 
worldly,  how  then  shall  we  call  men  out  of  the 
world  ? 

And  yet  this  is  our  appointed  task.  We  are 
sent  to  call  the  people  home,  as  "  Mary  called 
the  cattle  home  across  the  sands  o'  Dee."f  And 
though  the  tide  of  popular  disfavor  run  high 
against  us,  until  our  feet  are  washed  by  the  "  cruel 
crawling  foam,"  still  we  must  stand  and  call  the 
people  home  across  the  sands  o'  Dee. 

And,  O  my  Fathers  and  my  brothers,  are  we 
doing  this,  are  our  voices  going  out,  clear  and 
sharp  and  strong  as  the  fife  of  the  pied  piper  of 
Hamelin,  charming  the  people  to  follow  us  to  the 
mountain  of  God  ? 

Whoever  speaks  with  the  Voice  of  God  will  be 
followed   by    the    people   of  God.     John    Wesley 

*  Hamlet,  Act  ist,  Scene  III.  f  Chas.  Kingsley's  Poem. 


/J.6  A    Voice  in  the   Wilder7tess. 

spoke  with  that  Voice  in  the  last  century,  and  God 
gave  him  the  thousands  of  Wesleyanism  and  the 
millions  of  Methodism. 

It  is  the  Voice  of  God  speaking  in  the  Church 
that  will  give  peace  to  the  Church.  If  that  Voice 
cannot  speak  to  us  or  if  we  cannot  hear  it,  then 
all  the  scriptures  written  since  the  world  began 
will  not  help  us.  The  unbeliever,  then,  will  have 
us  on  the  hip.  He  will  say  if  God  cannot  speak, 
God  has  not  spoken. 

There  is  nothing  in  this  world  more  wonderful 
than  the  origin  and  the  history  of  a  word.  It 
exists  first  in  that  region  dim,  mysterious,  wonder- 
ful where  unconscious  thought  dwells  alone ;  then 
it  comes  out  into  conscious  thought  and  the  mind 
gives  it  form  and  order ;  then  the  lips  utter  it  and 
it  becomes  a  sound,  it  goes  out  and  enters  the  ears 
of  the  hearer ;  he  writes  it  down,  and  sound  then 
becomes  transformed  into  sight.  Ages  afterward, 
it  may  be,  a  man  sees  this  written  word ;  he  speaks 
it  with  his  lips  :  it  becomes  sound  again  ;  it  enters 
into  his  mind  through  his  ears  ;  it  becomes  thought, 
it  goes  back  into  the  dark  chambers  of  uncon- 
sciousness, and  there  by  the  magic  of  the  soul's 
power,  it  is  transformed  into  life.  And  in  this 
wonderful  process  we  have  the  conservation  of 
spiritual  energy ;  the  secret  of  man's  progress. 

So  God's  written  word  upon  the  lips  of  the 
preacher  must  become  God's  spoken  word  :  it  must 
be  not  what  God  said  to  Abraham,  Isaac  and  Jacob, 
but  what  God  says  to  you  and  me,  and  that  spoken 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  /f.y 

word  must  pierce  the  heart  of  the  hearer,  and 
from  that  heart  it  must  come  back,  not  as  a  word, 
but  as  a  life. 

The  unity  of  the  Church  will  never  come  from 
the  reading  of  a  book,  it  will  come  from  the  hear- 
ing of  a  Voice. 

When  the  Voice  of  Jesus  sounds  over  land  and 
sea,  and  men  hear  that  Voice  and  begin  to  follow 
it,  then  they  will  be  united  as  the  sheep  are  united 
who  hear  and  follow  the  voice  of  the  shepherd. 

O,  that  it  were  in  us  to  stop  our  din  and  our 
discussion,  to  give  up  every  man  his  psalm  and 
every  man  his  doctrine,  and  lay  our  fingers  on  our 
lips  and  listen,  if  perchance  we  may  hear  Jesus 
"  calling  o'er  the  tumult,"  "  Come  and  follow  Me." 


CHAPTER  III. 

THE  FAITHFUL  IN  CHRIvST  JESUS. 

When  S.  Paul  writes  his  letter  to  tlie  Churcli  in 
Epliesus,  the  most  spiritual  of  all  the  churches,  he 
calls    its    members    the    faithful   in  Christ  Jesus. 

Tot9  TTtcTTOt?  ev  Irjcrov  ^picrTOV. 

And  this  word  faithful  was  the  dearest  word  to 
the  Christian  heart  during  all  the  heroic  ages  of 
the  Church.  It  was  to  him  what  the  word  loyalist 
was  to  the  followers  of  the  Stuart  during  all  the 
dark  days  of  the  rebellion  ;  what  the  word  royalist 
was  to  the  noble  of  France  during  the  horrors  of 
terror. 

Faithful  in  Christ  Jesus.  These  words  ex- 
pressed the  supreme  devotion  of  his  life ;  that  for 
which  he  lived,  and  that  for  which  he  was  more 
than  ready  to  die. 

If  a  stranger  met  a  stranger  on  the  highways  of 
Rome  and  saw  that  stranger  make,  as  it  were, 
the  sign  of  the  cross,  he  hurried  to  him  and  whis- 
pered in  his  ear  "Art  thou  of  the  faithful,"  and  if 
he  answered  yea,  then  these  two  clasped  hands, 
and  though  they  had  never  seen  each  other's  face 
before,  were  instantly  brothers  in  a  common  faith. 

The  Christian  man  and  woman  of  the  early  ages 
lived  by  faith  in  the  most  real  sense  of  those  words. 
The  whole  order  of  their  life  was  based  upon  an  im- 
plicit belief  in  Christ  Jesus.  They  believed  that 
He  was  the  great  power  of  God  sent  down  from 
heaven  for  their  salvation.     They  believed  that  He 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  /j.g 

had  lived  for  them  and  died  for  them,  and  that  they 
in  turn  ought  to  live  for  Him  and  die  for  Him. 

They  received  every  word  of  Christ  Jesus  as  a 
word  from  God  and  staked  their  whole  existence 
upon  its  truthfulness.  Whatever  Jesus  told  them 
to  do,  that  they  tried,  with  all  their  might  and 
main,  to  do  ;  holding  that  whatever  Jesus  said  was 
right. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  history  of  the  world  to 
be  compared  with  the  devotion  of  the  early  Chris- 
tians to  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ. 

The  devotion  of  the  forty-seven  Ronins  to  their 
lord,  the  devotion  of  a  highland  clan  to  its  chief, 
the  devotion  of  the  old  guard  to  Napoleon,  these 
are  all  splendid  examples  of  what  love  and  loyalty 
can  do  with  the  human  heart  and  with  human  life. 

But  they  are  all  weak  and  things  of  a  day  in 
comparison  with  that  age-long  devotion,  extending 
over  three  hundred  years,  by  which  the  Christain 
Church  testified  her  love  and  loyalty  to  her  Lord 
and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ. 

Kvery  sacrifice  that  could  be  made  was  made  to 
gain  the  favor,  and  upbuild  the  cause  of  the  Lord. 
S.  Paul  set  the  keynote  of  the  coming  ages  when 
he  cried  "  I  count  all  things  as  dung  that  I  may 
gain  Christ."* 

The  Christian  Church  planted  itself  upon  its 
simple  faith  in  Christ  Jesus,  and  standing  there, 
defied  the  whole  force  of  the  Roman  empire  and 
of  ancient  civilization. 

*  Philippians  iii,  8. 


50  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

They  did  not  take  up  arms  against  tlie  State : 
for  Christ  had  said,  "  Whosoever  taketh  the  sword 
shall  perish  with  the  sword."*  They  did  not  resist 
their  enemies  :  for  Christ  had  said  "  Resist  not 
evil." 

But  theirs  was  not  a  cowardly  submission  to 
baseness  and  injustice,  it  was  the  bravest  resistance 
the  world  has  ever  seen.  The  early  Christian 
martyr  stood  calmly  in  his  place  ;  refused  obedi- 
ence when  his  conscience  told  him  he  must  not 
obey,  and  for  his  refusal  died.  And  his  sufferings 
and  death  made  up  what  was  "  lacking  in  the 
sufferings  of  Christ." 

And  all  this  was  done  so  calmly  and  so  sweetly, 
for  the  most  part,  that  the  very  persecutors  were 
won  by  the  faith  and  devotion  of  the  Christian. 
When  S.  Polycarp  was  brought  before  the  Gover- 
nor and  commanded  to  deny  Christ,  he  answered, 
"  eighty  and  six  years  have  I  served  him  and  he  has 
done  me  no  harm.  Why  should  I  deny  him  to- 
day, "f  And  he  went  out  from  the  presence  of  the 
Governor  into  the  presence  of  death  as  calmly 
as  he  would  go  to  his  morning  meal.  To  die  for 
Jesus  was  to  him  and  all  like  him  a  mere  matter 
of  course. 

Such  was  the  faithfulness  of  heart  and  life 
which  gave  to  the  Christian  his  name  of  the 
faithful. 

*  Matthew  xxvi,  52. 

t  Martyrdom  of  S.  Polycarp.     Apostolic  Fathers.     T.  &  T.  Clark.- 
Edinburgh,  1873. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  51 

And  this  faithfulness  when  fully  roused  is  one 
of  the  strongest  passions  of  the  human  heart. 
All  great  and  heroic  deeds  and  words  spring  from 
it.  To  this  emotion,  Christ  Jesus  appealed  when 
He  presented  Himself  as  the  supreme  object  of 
human  adoration.  He  stood  and  cried,  "  Come 
unto  me  all  ye  that  labor  and  are  heavy  laden  and 
I  will  give  you  rest.'"-'  "  God  so  loved  the  world 
that  He  gave  His  only  begotten  Son,  that  whoso- 
ever believeth  in  Him  should  not  perish  but  have 
everlasting  life."f  Believe  and  be  saved  was  the 
cry  of  the  Gospel. 

Jesus  presented  Himself,  in  His  divine  Per- 
sonality, as  the  supreme  object  of  human  faith, 
because  faithfulness  can  reach  its  highest  develop- 
ment only  when  it  is  directed  toward  a  person. 
An  abstract  doctrine,  an  impersonal  cause  can 
never  fire  the  human  heart  to  intense  devotion. 

A  cause  can  never  lay  hold  of  the  mass  of  the 
people  until  it  shows  itself  in  some  great  life  and 
leadership.  The  cause  of  righteousness  itself 
made  no  headway  until  the  King  of  righteousness 
came  to  champion  his  own  cause  and  to  win  men 
to  it  by  winning  them  to  Himself 

Faithfulness  is  the  root  of  faith,  and  faith  is 
the  source  of  creed.  Faithfulness  is  the  heart's 
love  and  devotion.  Faith  is  the  expression  of 
faithfulness  in  life.  Creed  is  the  expression  of 
faith  in  words. 

The  Christian  creed  grew  up  naturally  out  of 

*  Matthew  xi,  28.  f  John  iii,  16. 


5-2  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

the  Christian  faith.  As  Christian  men  and  women 
went  up  and  down  the  world,  they  were  whispering 
in  their  souls  of  all  that  Jesus  had  done  for  them, 
"  Beginning  from  John  Baptist  until  the  day  He 
was  taken  up  from  them  into  heaven."*  When 
they  met  together  they  told  each  other  of  His 
wonderful  birth,  His  life,  His  passion.  His  death. 
His  resurrection.  His  ascension.  They  told  each 
other  to  wait  and  watch  for  His  coming,  as  men 
wait  and  watch  for  the  morning.  They  cast  this 
belief  of  theirs,  which  was  the  very  warp  and  woof 
of  their  life,  into  songs,  and  they  sang  them  when 
they  came  together  to  worship.  And  they  sang  as 
they  went  about  their  work  at  home.  As  it  is 
written,  "  And  the  ransomed  of  the  Lord  shall 
return  and  come  to  Zion  with  songs  and  everlasting 
joy  upon  their  heads. "f  So  those  ransomed  of  the 
Lord  returned  to  Zion  with  songs.  These  songs 
were  the  great  distinguishing  mark  of  the  Christian. 

' '  Paul  and  Silas  in  their  prison 
Sang  of  Christ  the  L,ord  arisen."  j 

All  the  information  that  Pliny  could  give  to 
his  master,  the  Kmperor  Trajan,  concerning  the 
Christian  was,  "  that  they  met  early  in  the  morn- 
ing to  sing  songs  to  one  Christ  as  God,  and  bound 
themselves  by  a  solemn  compact  to  do  no  evil."|| 

So  the  Christian  creed  came  into  existence.  A 
song,  a  saying,  a  few  pregnant  sentences,  passed 
from  lip  to  lip  ;  and  grew  at  last  into  a  settled  form 

*  Acts  i,  22.  t  Isaiah  xxxv,  lo.  X  Longfellow. 

II  Pliny's  letters  to  Trajan. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  ^j 

of  sound  words.  There  was  no  attempt  at  system- 
atic arrangement,  no  effort  at  completeness,  no 
struggle  to  fathom  the  awful  mystery  of  the  life  of 
God  in  the  flesh.  It  was  all  simple  and  natural 
and  childlike. 

The  Christian  creed  was  not  the  result  of  an 
effort  of  the  human  intelligence  to  know  God ;  it 
was  the  outgrowth  of  the  human  heart  in  the  great- 
est effort  that  heart  has  ever  made  to  love  God. 

The  Christian  creed  has  no  existence  apart  from 
the  person  of  Jesus  Christ.  The  creed  apart  from 
devotion  to  the  person  of  Jesus  is  a  mere  intellectual 
puzzle  ;  good  onlj^  to  frighten  the  intelligence  and 
perplex  the  soul. 

During  the  first  age  the  Church  was  careless  of 
her  creed.  She  had  one  faith  to  which  she  held 
with  all  the  tenacity  of  her  life,  but  she  had  as 
many  creeds  or  forms  of  faith  as  she  had  children. 

For  three  hundred  years  there  was  no  creed 
enforced  under  authority. 

It  was  not  until  the  great  Arian  discussion  that 
the  Church  in  its  corporate  capacity  became  a 
formulator  of  creeds.  This  action  was  forced  upon 
the  Church  by  that  most  unhappy  controversy  that 
wasted  her  life  for  two  hundred  years. 

Men  of  subtle  minds  had  arisen  in  her  midst,  who, 
not  content  with  the  simplicity  of  the  gospels,  must 
needs  define  more  exactly  the  nature  of  the  Lord's 
person,  and  the  inter-relations  of  the  God-head. 

These  definitions  frightened  the  Church.  It 
seemed  to  her  that  men  were  defining  her  Lord  out 


5^  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

of  existence  ;  they  were  making  of  Jesus,  that  man 
of  sorrows,  a  mere  phantasm ;  they  were  making 
of  the  Son  of  God,  not  a  son  but  a  creature.  They 
were  dividing  His  divine  personality ;  they  were 
destroying  His  human  nature. 

The  Lord  Jesus  Christ  was  betrayed  into  the 
hand  of  Greek  Dialetic  ;  He  was  worse  than  cruci- 
fied ;  the  unsanctified  human  intelligence  entered 
into  the  Holy  of  Holies  and  stared  with  unhallowed 
gaze  upon  the  Divine  mysteries,  and  like  an  unruly 
child  sought  to  take  those  mysteries  apart,  that  it 
might  see  how  they  were  made  up. 

The  Church  in  her  fright  met  definition  by 
assertion.  She  brought  in  new  words  to  set  forth 
old  truths.  She  did  her  best  in  her  hour  of  danger 
to  guard  the  faith  once  delivered  to  the  Saints. 
But  her  best  was  simply  a  choice  of  evils.  Her 
own  definitions  and  assertions  became  stumbling 
blocks  in  her  way. 

I  wonder  if  we  know  when  we  sing  the  great 
Nicene  creed,  what  that  creed  cost  the  Church.  We 
set  it  to  music  and  sing  it  lightly  with  our  lips,  all 
unmindful  of  the  fact  that  it  cost  the  Church  two 
centuries  of  life  and  the  fairest  portion  of  the 
earth. 

The  great  Nicene  Council  opened  that  era  in  the 
Church's  history,  which  to  my  thinking  is  the 
most  futile  and  unhappy  in  all  her  life. 

It  was  the  era  of  discussion.  The  whole  world 
was  taken  with  an  itch  for  definition.  Bishops 
and  laymen,  emperors  and  slaves ;  every  man  was 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  55 

trying  to  explain  God.  One  controversy  followed 
another  in  rapid  succession :  tlie  Arian  by  the 
Nestorian ;  the  Nestorian  by  the  Eutychian ;  the 
Kutychian  by  the  three  chapters  ;  the  three  chap- 
ters by  the  Monotholite,  with  a  dozen  smaller  con- 
troversies thrown  in.  The  whole  world  went  mad 
in  an  effort  to  set  down  in  words  the  exact  truth 
about  things,  which  words  at  the  best  can  never 
adequately  express,  but  only  faintly  shadow  forth. 

In  this  impious  attempt  to  build  this  intellectual 
tower  of  Babel,  and  to  scale  the  heavens  upon  the 
ladder  of  his  reason,  the  Christian  of  the  fourth 
century  sacrificed  the  life  of  primitive  Christianity. 
IvOve  perished,  righteousness  was  driven  from  the 
earth,  reverence  was  torn  to  tatters.  Banishment 
and  death  was  inflicted  by  each  party  upon  its 
opponents  ;  every  impurity  and  injustice  was  for- 
given a  man,  if  he  would  only  cry  ofioiovo-ia  or 
ofiovovaia  in  the  right  time  and  place  ;  the  most 
sacred  mysteries  of  our  holy  religion  were  bandied 
to  and  fro  upon  the  profane  lips  of  the  factions  in 
the  circus  of  Constantinople,  and  the  different 
schools  of  Christian  doctrine  were  patronized  b}^ 
mimes  and  harlots.* 

Now  the  result  of  all  this  was  death.  The  life 
was  eaten  out  of  the  heart  of  Eastern  Christianity. 
In  three  centuries  it  fell  an  easy  prey  to  Islam,  and 
the  storm  centers  of  the  controversy,  Antioch, 
Alexandria  and  Constantinople  are  to  this  day  in 
the  power  of  the  infidel. 

*  See  Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire. 


5<5  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

That  is  the  awful  price  which  the  Church  has 
paid  for  definitions. 

But  a  still  greater  price  was  demanded  by  the 
terrific  logic  of  life.  In  her  great  controversies 
the  Church  lost  the  vital  connection  between  Creed 
and  Faith.  Her  devotion  was  no  longer  to  a 
person,  it  was  to  a  doctrine ;  it  was  to  a  system. 
Men  were  led  to  lay  great  stress  upon  words  to 
the  forgetfulness  of  persons  and  things. 

And  to  this  day  that  vital  connection  between 
Creed  and  Faith  has  never  been  restored.  To 
this  day  right  thinking,  so  called,  is  set  far 
ahead  of  right  living.  The  connection  between 
Faith  and  Creed  is,  of  course,  strong  in  a  multi- 
tude of  human  hearts,  else  Christianity  had  long 
since  perished  out  of  the  world.  But  the  organ- 
ized bodies  of  Christians  still  bow  down  to  their 
definitions  as  an  African  bushman  bows  down  to 
his  fetich. 

And  men  and  women  who  love  the  Lord  Jesus 
Christ  and  who  might  live  in  holy  concord,  are 
separated  from  each  other  by  obsolete  words  and 
worn-out  phrases. 

Therefore  it  is  hopeless  to  expect  to  unify  Chris- 
tendom upon  the  basis  of  a  creed.  Christian  men 
have  fought  so  long  over  their  creeds  that  the  very 
word  is  a  war  cry.  If  we  would  restore  the  lost 
unity  of  Christendom,  we  must  go  back  to  the 
point  where  unity  was  lost.  We  must  go  from 
Creed  to  Faith,  and  from  Faith  to  faithfulness. 

We  must  bear  in  mind  constantly  the  fact  that 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  57 

Christianity  is  not  a  doctrine,  it  is  a  life ;  it  is  not 
a  philosophy,  it  is  a  religion.  And  this  religion 
consists  in  personal  devotion  to  Jesus  Christ. 

It  is  for  the  Christian  ministry  to  show  to  the 
Christian  Church,  and  for  the  Christian  Church 
to  show  to  the  world  that  it  really  believes  in  Jesus 
Christ.  What  it  believes  of  Him  may  be  left  for 
after-consideration.  What  then  ?  Shall  we  cast 
away  our  creed  ?  God  forbid.  I  that  speak  to  you 
am  the  very  last  that  could  give  up  the  creed.  I 
love  it  with  all  the  love  that  comes  of  custom  and 
of  use.  For  twenty  years  I  have  said  the  creed 
morning  by  morning,  as  at  my  altar  I  have  sacri- 
ficed the  mysteries  of  the  Precious  Blood. 

And  it  is  this  very  thing  that  gives  me  pause 
when  I  stop  to  think  what  great  words  I  have  said 
about  God^  what  little  tJinigs  I  have  done  for  Him., 
what  adulation  for  Jesus  has  been  on  my  lips, 
what  coldness  for  Him  in  my  heart,  then  that 
heart  stands  still  with  fear,  and  I  am  wondering 
not  what  I  am  to  think  and  say  concerning  the  Lord 
Jesus  Christ,  but  what  He  is  to  think  and  say  con- 
cerning  me.     Dare  I   stand  before   the  judgment 

of  conscience,  and  cry  670)  enxi  inaTO'i.  ev  Irjadu  -y^plcnov. 

Fathers  in  the  Church,  brothers  in  the  ministry. 
Churchmen  and  women  of  this  generation,  am  I 
alone  in  this  fear  ?  Can  this  great  Anglo-Ameri- 
can communion,  which  has  asserted  its  unfalter- 
ing belief  in  the  creed,  say  also  that  it  has  implicit 
faith  in  Christ  Jesus,  undying  faithfulness  toward 
Him  ?     Is    this    great    communion    day    by    day 


^8  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

translating  its   Creed  into  FaitH,  and  Faitli  into 
faithfulness  ? 

If  this  wonderful  process  of  transmutation  is 
not  going  on ;  if  the  creed  is  held  external  to  the 
life ;  if  it  is  not  in  vital  connection  with  the  living 
faith  and  loving  faithfulness,  then  that  creed  is 
vain.     It  is  death  and  the  cause  of  death. 

There  is  no  more  deadly  error  than  to  think 
that  we  can  please  God  by  word,  while  we  displease 
Him  by  thought  and  deed.  It  is  vain  that  we  cry 
Lord,  Lord,  if  we  do  not  the  things  which  He 
says. 

God  does  not  love  adulation.  A  man  tried  that 
once ;  he  came  running  to  Jesus  and  knelt  down 
and  worshiped  Him,  saying,  "  Good  Master,  what 
shall  I  do  to  inherit  eternal  life  ?"  Jesus  looked  at 
him  in  pity  and  in  scorn  and  answered,  "  why 
callest  thou  me  good  ?  Go  sell  all  that  thou  hast 
and  give  to  the  poor  and  come  and  follow  me." 

When  I  think  of  all  the  adulation  that  goes  up 
to  Jesus  Christ  in  creed  and  hymn ;  how  we  call 
Him  God  of  God,  Light  of  Light,  Very  God  of  Very 
God,  and  then  go  on  about  our  business  and  our 
pleasure,  with  the  same  indifference  toward  Him 
as  if  He  were  no  more  than  the  stump  of  Dagon 
fallen  on  the  threshold  of  the  temple,  I  wonder 
that  He  does  not  wither  us  with  His  scorn  and  vex 
us  with  His  sore  displeasure. 

And,  when  I  look  out  on  the  world,  I  see  that  is 
just  what  He  has  done.  He  has  smitten  us 
with  impotence.     Our  weakness,  our  foolish  divi- 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  5p 

sions,  our  worldliness,  all  show  us  that  Jesus  is  not 
pleased  with  us. 

We  must  beware  how  we  use  our  creed,  lest  we 
make  of  it  a  charm  or  talisman  ;  lest  we  mumble  it 
as  a  witch  mumbles  her  incantation,  thinking  that 
in  the  mere  words  there  is  a  virtue  to  save  our 
souls. 

Outward  words  in  themselves  are  nothing,  they 
are  mere  waves  of  the  air ;  they  live,  they  die,  they 
change  their  meaning,  they  pass  away.  Words 
heretical  in  the  third  century  are  war  cries  of 
orthodoxy  in  the  fourth. 

It  is  the  besetting  sin  of  the  ecclesiastic  who  is 
largely  a  dealer  in  words,  that  he  mistakes  words 
for  things.  I  have  heard  men  wisely  argue,  that 
if  such  and  such  a  definition  were  not  accepted, 
Jesus  would  cease  to  be ;  His  salvation  fail  from 
the  earth. 

Now  a  true  conception  of  Jesus  and  of  His  plan 
of  salvation  is  most  necessary  to  man,  but  Jesus, 
Himself,  exists  apart  from  all  conception,  a  Fact 
in  the  Universe.  What  we  have  to  do  at  our  peril 
is  to.  see  that  our  words  correspond  to  the  fact,  and 
our  life  to  our  words. 

And  the  one  fact  concerning  Jesus  is  that  He  is 
here  in  this  world  as  the  guide  of  our  life,  the 
object  of  our  devotion. 

If  we  love  Him  and  follow  Him,  if  we  are  faithful 
to  Him,  that  faithfulness  will  soon  become  faith, 
that  faith  a  creed  or  confession. 

The  creed  or  confession  will  not  be  and  ought 


6o  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

not  to  be  the  same  for  every  nian.*  Maybe,  our 
creed  will  be  the  heart-broken  creed  of  the  Publi- 
can, "  God  be  merciful  to  me  a  sinner,"  or  the 
creed  of  the  woman  with  the  issue  of  blood,  "  if 
I  do  but  touch  the  hem  of  His  garment  I  shall 
be  whole,"  or  we  may  rise  to  the  creed  of  S.  Peter, 
"  Thou  art  the  Christ,  the  son  of  the  Living  God," 
or  of  S.  Thomas,  "  My  Lord  and  my  God."  But 
whatever  our  creed,  let  it  be  the  true  expression  of 
our  faith,  as  our  faith  is  of  our  faithfulness. 

And,  O  Fathers  of  the  Christian  Church,  as 
you  stand  in  the  streets,  and  cry  unto  men,  I 
beg  and  beseech  of  you  by  all  that  is  wise  and 
true,  do  not  cry  unto  men,  believe  in  the  Nicene  or 
any  other  creed,  but  cry,  believe  in  the  Lord  Jesus 
Christ.  Do  not  rob  the  heart  of  man  of  a  Person 
and  give  him  a  definition. 

The  center  of  spiritual  gravity  is  not  in  the 
decree  of  any  council  however  great ;  the  center  of 
spiritual  gravity  is  in  the  heart  of  Jesus  Christ. 

*The  Church's  Creed  is  the  expression  of  her  corporate  faith  and 
is  the  same  for  the  whole  Church.  But  the  Church  must  live  her 
creed  as  well  as  say  it. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THE   POWER   OF   HOLINESS. 

To  the  Church  in  Pergamos  the  Spirit  saith  to 
him  that  overcometh  "  will  I  give  a  white  stone 
and  in  the  stone  a  new  name  written."* 

This  gift  of  the  white  stone  and  the  new  name 
was  not  confined  to  the  church  in  Pergamos  :  it 
was  a  gift  of  God  to  the  whole  Church  of  Christ. 

Among  the  four  names  given  by  S.  Paul  to  the 
Christians  was  one  which  may  well  be  called  a 
new  name.  The  sound  of  it,  in  the  sense  in  which 
he  used  it,  had  never  before  been  heard  on  the 
earth. 

Men  had  known  before  what  it  was  to  be  called 
of  God,  not  only  men  of  the  Hebrews,  but  men  of 
all  the  nations  of  the  earth. 

We  make  a  great  mistake  if  we  suppose  that  the 
great  Pre-Christian  religions  of  the  Aryan  nations, 
the  Indian,  the  Greek,  the  Scandinavian,  the 
religions  which  we  now  call  mythologies,  were  the 
work  of  devils,  or  the  creation  of  diseased  and 
insane  imaginations.  These  religions  had  in  them 
the  voice  of  God.  They  were  man's  first  efforts  to 
hear  that  voice  and  give  it  human  articulation. 
The  Aryan  nations  heard  the  voices  of  their  gods 
at  Delphic  oracle  and  Dodona  oak ;  in  Druid  for- 
ests and  by  Ganges  waters  ;  and  those  voices  had 
called  them  to  a  higher  and  a  better  life,  to  love  of 

*  Revelation  ii,  17. 


62  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

beauty  and  of  order,  to  love  of  family  and  of  state, 
to  sacrifice  and  to  worship.* 

So  it  was  no  new  thing  for  men  to  know  that 
men  might  be  called  of  God. 

Nor  was  faithfulness  a  new  virtue  in  the  earth. 
It  was  one  of  the  great  civic  virtues  of  antiquity, 
the  one  most  highly  rewarded,  the  one  most 
severely  avenged.  For  its  performance  Rome 
gave  the  consulship  :  for  its  violation  the  Tarpeian 
Rock.  Men  had  learned  to  be  faithful  long  before 
Paul  preached  Christ  to  the  Gentiles. 

But  there  was  one  name  of  S.  Paul's  which  was 
in  reality  a  new  name  and  signified  a  new  quality 
in  humanity. 

In  writing  to  the  Church  in  Philippi  he  writes 
to  all  the  Saints  in  Christ  Jesus  which  are  in 
Philippi,  and  this  is  the  new  name  given  of  God 

to  men,  toi'^  d'yiol<i  ev  Irjaov  '^ptaTOV. 

And  of  all  the  qualities  of  the  Christian  charac- 
ter this  was  that  which  he  valued  most.  It  was 
that  gift  of  God  to  him  which  won  his  lasting 
gratitude  and  made  him  a  devoted  servant  of  God 
and  of  Jesus  Christ  his  Lord. 

When  a  man  became  a  follower  of  Jesus  Christ 
he  became  a  holy  man,  a  saint  of  God  and  this 
was  to  him  a  treasure  hid  in  a  field,  a  pearl  of 
great  price. 

As  some  weary  traveler  who  all  day  long  has 
made  his  way  through  some  foul  bog,  where  death 
and  decay  were  all  around,  where  hissing  serpent 

*  See  Cox,  Mythology  of  the  Aryan  Nations. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  6j 

and  deadly  cypress  strewed  his  patli  with  poison, 
where  the  dank  and  stagnant  water  was  not  fit  to 
drink,  nor  could  he  wash  his  hands  and  face  in  it, 
where  the  air  was  heavy  with  the  breath  of  death : 
when  this  man  at  eventide  drags  his  almost 
exhausted  body  upon  some  upland  and  breathes 
pure  air  again,  and  comes  upon  a  spring  of  water 
and  washes  his  hands  and  his  face ;  then  that  man 
is  happier  than  he  ever  was  before  in  all  his  life. 
He  has  escaped  from  death ;  he  has  seen  the  sky 
again ;  he  has  water  to  drink  and  he  has  washed 
and  is  clean. 

Now  this  was  the  feeling  that  was  in  the  heart 
of  the  Christian  when  he  came  out  of  the  world 
into  the  Christian  Church. 

That  world  from  which  he  came  out  was  an 
unclean  world,  a  world  lying  in  wickedness,  a 
world  of  moral  and  spiritual  death. 

We  cannot  look  back  to  the  world  as  it  was 
when  Paul  was  preaching  Christ  to  the  Gentiles, 
without  a  feeling  of  pitiful  horror  for  the  men  and 
the  women  who  lived  at  that  time. 

The  world  as  it  was  then  was  a  world  in  decay : 
a  world  smitten  with  moral  leprosy,  and  was 
sloughing  off  into  a  shameful  and  dishonored 
death. 

Whatever  there  had  been  that  was  good  and 
noble  in  the  Aryan  religions  of  Greece  and  Rome 
was  gone ;  only  the  base  and  degrading,  the  mean- 
ingless ritual,  the  senseless  doctrine,  the  unclean 
ceremony  was  left  to  satisfy  the  heart  of  man. 
5 


d/f.  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

The  orgiastic  religion  of  Semitic  Asia  had  to  a 
great  extent  supplanted  the  more  simple,  natural 
religion  of  Aryan  Europe.  The  favorite  divinities 
were  Dionysius,  a  god  from  the  East,  and  Aphrodite 
or  Cythera,  who  was  none  other  than  Astarte,  the 
moon  goddess,  of  evil  fame. 

The  orgy  was  the  ceremony  that  men  and 
women  practiced  as  most  pleasing  to  the  gods. 

To  drink  till  a  man  was  drunken  ;  to  dance  till 
a  woman  was  mad ;  to  gratify  lust  till  lust  became 
a  frenzy,  was  counted  among  the  highest  duties  of 
religion. 

The  ancient  religions  at  their  best,  even  the 
Aryan  religions,  were  lacking  in  two  great  essen- 
tial qualities  ;  they  were  without  mercy  and  with- 
out purity.  There  were  brave  gods  and  beautiful 
gods  and  wise  gods,  but  save  ouly  Athene  there 
were  no  pure  gods  and  no  kind  gods.* 

From  the  death  of  Julius  Caesar  to  the  death  of 
Nero  the  dissolution  of  Roman  society  went  on  with 
frightful  rapidity.  Rome,  by  her  conquests,  had 
destroyed  the  smaller  states,  and  in  their  destruc- 
tion the  one  redeeming  virtue  of  ancient  civiliza- 
tion perished.  Patriotism  was  gone.  The  best 
men  in  the  cities  of  Greece  and  Asia,  having 
no  openings  at  home,  hastened  in  crowds  to  Rome, 
seeking  honor  and  preferment  from  the  favor  of 
the  emperor.  Men  who  might  have  been  states- 
men in  Athens,  in  Antioch,  in  Jerusalem,  became 
mere  politicians  in  the  Imperial  City. 

*  See  Cox,  Aryan  Mythology.     Tylor's  Primitive  Culture. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  dj 

Rome  could  excite  the  emotions  of  awe  and  ter- 
ror, but  never  reverence  and  love.  Rome  was  to 
the  Provincial  as  cold  as  death,  as  resistless  as  a 
glacier,  as  cruel  as  the  sea.  She  was  as  silent  as 
the  stars  and  as  impartial  as  the  sands  of  the 
desert.  She  covered  the  whole  civilized  world  with 
one  even,  arid,  implacable  tyranny. 

She  not  only  conquered  the  nations,  she  con- 
quered their  gods,  she  carried  them  about  and 
mixed  them  up  in  one  corrupting  mass  of  decay, 
and  no  man  knew  his  god  from  another.'^' 

Now  when  human  society  goes  to  pieces  it  lets 
loose  the  primitive  passions  of  man,  the  passion 
of  lust  and  the  passion  of  cruelty.  And  these 
passions  ran  riot  in  those  days  and  there  was 
nothing  to  hinder  them.  Lust  took  on  the  most 
unnatural  and  revolting  forms.  Mere  ordinary 
sins  and  crimes  no  longer  satisfied  the  jaded  senses 
and  depraved  imaginations  of  a  worn-out  race. 

The  simple  prostitution  of  woman  was  sweet 
and  wholesome  and  almost  a  virtue  in  comparison 
with  darker  deeds  of  uncleanness. 

Men  and  women  were  in  despair ;  they  did  not 
know  what  to  do.  The  stoic  fled  for  refuge  into 
his  cold  and  hopeless  austerity.  The  epicurean 
sought  to  satisfy  his  conscience  with  a  philoso- 
phy that  made  sensual  pleasure  the  supreme  good. 
But  neither  stoic  nor  epicurean  found  peace.  Men 
ran  from  themselves  as  from  a  horror  and  suicide 
was  the  fashion  of  the  day. 

*  See  Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall.     Satyres  of  Juvenal. 


66  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

Now  out  of  this  world  of  sin  a  man  came  into 
tlie  Christian  Church.  No  sooner  had  he  crossed 
the  threshold  of  the  holy  place,  than  he  found  he 
had  passed  from  death  unto  life. 

In  the  Christian  community  he  found  not  only 
purity,  such  purity  as  the  Roman  knew  in  the 
days  of  Lucrece  and  Virginia,  he  found  a  higher 
quality  of  soul,  he  saw  for  the  first  time  what 
men  call  holiness.  It  was  a  revelation  to  him.  It 
took  possession  of  his  soul  as  light  takes  posses- 
sion of  the  eyes,  and  filled  him  with  joy  and  glad- 
ness. 

It  was  this  power  of  holiness  which  was  the 
great  staying  power  of  the  Primitive  Christian 
Church. 

We  wonder  what  brought  men  into  the  Christian 
Church  and  what  kept  them  there.  The  whole 
world  was  against  them,  Christianity  was  not  then 
fashionable.  To  become  a  Christian  meant  to 
become  an  outcast.  The  very  name  was  an  accu- 
sation. If  a  man  entered  the  Church  he  did  it  at 
the  hazard  of  his  life ;  he  severed  the  noblest  ties 
of  humanity,  he  became  an  object  of  hatred  to  his 
father  and  mother,  the  wife  of  his  bosom  despised 
and  forsook  him.  At  any  instant  he  might  hear 
the  cry  of  ad  leones  and  find  himself  in  the  jaws  of 
the  beast. 

Yet  for  all  this  men  and  women  crowded  into 
the  Christian  Church  by  the  thousand,  and  there 
they  staid  in  spite  of  entreaty,  of  persecution  and 
of  death. 


A    Voice  ijt  the   Wilderness.  6y 

And  if  by  any  chance,  by  slip  of  sin  or  act  of 
cowardice,  a  man  lost  his  place  in  the  Church,  then 
he  was  heart-broken  and  stood  for  years  in  the 
porch,  and  begged  the  faithful  to  pray  for  him  that 
he  might  be  restored  again  to  his  place  and  once 
more  share  in  the  prayers  and  rites  of  the  Saints. 

Now  the  power  that  brought  him  to  Christ  and 
held  him  there  was  the  power  of  holiness. 

Man  is  so  constituted  that  when  he  has  once 
seen  the  best,  he  never  can  be  satisfied  with  less 
than  the  best. 

When  Esther  Lyon  has  known  the  love  of  the 
strong,  severe  and  truthful  Felix  Holt,  she  cannot 
decline  to  the  soft  and  sensual  love  of  Harold 
Transome.'^ 

When  a  man  has  seen  and  known  the  holiness 
of  Christ  and  lost  it,  he  is  more  wretched  and 
forlorn  than  a  man  who  has  had  a  crown  and  lost  it. 

The  wisdom  of  God  is  seen  in  nothing  so  much 
as  this  device  of  His  to  win  and  hold  the  soul  of 
man.  He  wins  him  and  holds  him  by  giving  him 
the  best  thing  that  He  has. 

Christian  holiness  is  not  simply  chastity. 
Chastity  may  be  and  often  is  a  mere  negative 
virtue,  simply  the  absence  of  passion.  Holiness 
is  not  the  absence  of  passion,  it  is  the  presence  of 
passion.  It  is  the  purity  not  of  the  celibate  but 
of  the  lover.  Holiness  is  the  gift  of  God  to  those 
who  give  themselves  to  God.  It  is  the  reciprocal 
affection  between  the  soul  and  its  Maker. 

*  Felix  Holt  the  Radical.     Geo.  Eliot. 


68  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

Holiness  is  nothing  else  than  a  passion  for  God. 

Now  holiness  was  a  mark  of  the  Christian  Church, 
because  the  members  of  the  Church  were  holy. 

It  never  entered  the  mind  of  S.  Paul  that  a  man 
could  be  a  christian  and  not  be  a  saint.  If  a  man 
did  not  love  Christ,  why  then  was  he  a  christian  ? 
But  to  love  Christ  is  sanctity.  The  primitive 
christian  man  and  church  were  pure  because  they 
were  passionate.  It  was  the  passionate  love  of 
Jesus  that  burned  in  the  soul  and  destroyed  all 
loves  in  conflict  with  it.'^ 

Now  holiness,  which  is  love,  is  the  source  and 
power  of  all  sacraments.  Sacraments  are  nothing 
but  the  love  tokens  that  pass  between  God  and  the 
soul. 

What  is  baptism  but  the  water  which  Christ 
gives  us  to  wash  our  feet  when  we  come  in,  sin- 
stained,  foot-sore  and  weary  with  the  travail  of  life  ! 

What  is  the  sacrament  of  the  Precious  Blood  but 
the  bread  and  wine  with  which  Christ  refreshes  us 
after  we  come  back  from  our  work  and  our  labor 
in  the  evening ! 

Holiness,  then,  is  the  very  essence  of  the  sacra- 
ments. Without  holiness  the  sacraments  are  but 
cold  and  dead  formalities,  such  as  pass  between 
alienated  souls. 

For  a  sacrament  to  have  its  full  force  and  power, 
there  must  be  holiness  in  the  Church  that  admin- 
isters the  sacrament,  as  well  as  holiness  in  the  soul 
that  receives  the  sacraments. 

*  See  Ecce  Homo. 


A    Voice  in  the    Wilderness,  6p 

There  must  be  holiness  in  the  Church.  The 
great  mass  of  men  and  women  in  the  Church  must 
be,  at  least,  potential  saints.  They  must  be  men 
and  women  who  have  tried  at  least  to  give  their 
hearts  to  God :  men  and  women  whose  desire  is 
"  to  dwell  in  the  house  of  the  Lord  all  the  days  of 
their  life,  to  behold  the  fair  beauty  of  the  Lord,  and 
to  visit  his  temple." 

If  there  is  no  difference  at  all  between  the  Church 
and  the  world ;  if  the  Church  does  not  require  for 
membership  any  consecration  to  God ;  if  member- 
ship in  the  Church  is  mere  fashion,  or  convenience 
or  what  not ;  if  the  Church  does  not  guard  her 
sacraments  from  pollution  ;  if  she  gives  to  any  and 
everybody  without  thought  or  care  ;  if  a  man  may 
go  from  his  sin  to  his  sacrament,  easily,  lightly, 
without  repentance,  then  the  sacraments  of  that 
Church  are  without  force,  as  worthless  as  the  drop 
of  water  that  is  used,  as  insignificant  as  the  wafer 
and  the  wine. 

I  know  that  it  is  an  approved  doctrine  of  theology 
that  the  wickedness  of  the  minister  does  not  invali- 
date the  sacraments.  Nevertheless  I  should  think 
it  unsafe  long  to  receive  the  sacraments  at  the  hands 
of  a  priest  of  known  wickedness. 

But  when  a  whole  Church  is  unholy ;  has  no 
passionate  devotion  to  God ;  has  an  indifferent 
priesthood  and  a  careless  people,  then  the  sacra- 
ments of  that  Church  may  be  valid,  but  I  am  sure 
they  are  very  unwholesome  ;  they  are  salt  that  has 
lost  its  savor,  good  food  tainted  by  bad  air. 


JO  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

Does  it  ever  occur  to  us  to  seriously  inquire  into 
the  condition  of  the  modern  Church.  Its  doors  are 
wide  open,  it  is  easy  and  popular  to  enter,  there  is 
nothing  to  hinder,  and  yet  for  some  reason  the 
people  do  not  throng  and  press  as  they  did  in  the 
primitive  days. 

And  surely  it  cannot  be  that  there  is  no  need  for 
the  Church,  that  holiness  is  now  the  common 
possession  of  all  men. 

The  condition  of  the  modern  world  is  not  much 
better  than  was  the  condition  of  the  ancient  world. 
The  decay  of  faith  which  has  been  going  on  for 
the  last  three  hundred  years,  has  left  a  vast  body 
of  men  and  women  without  God  in  the  world. 

The  forces  of  modern  economic  conditions,  the 
terrific  pressure  of  competition,  the  vast  aggrega- 
tion of  population  in  the  cities,  the  presence  in 
every  city  of  a  mass  of  hopeless,  irresponsible  poor, 
and  a  small  company  of  equally  hopeless  and  irre- 
sponsible rich,  have  brought  our  modern  cities  into 
almost  as  wretched  a  moral  and  spiritual  decrepi- 
tude as  that  which  afflicted  the  cities  of  Asia  in  the 
days  of  the  decadence  of  Rome. 

The  necessities  of  the  poor,  together  with  their 
lack  of  moral  strength,  make  them  the  cheap  and 
easy  instruments  of  the  vices  of  the  rich. 

A  gentleman  in  I^ondon  said  to  me  one  day,  as  we 
were  watching  the  ceaseless  flow  of  under-sized,  un- 
derfed men  and  women,  go  up  the  Grays  Inn  Road  : 
"  Humanity  is  cheap  in  London.  You  can  buy  a 
man  or  a  woman  for  any  purpose  for  '  tu-'  pence." 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  yi 

Now,  why  is  not  the  Church  a  city  of  refuge  in 
the  midst  of  the  cities  of  the  world  ?  Is  it  not  be- 
cause the  Church  has  lost  the  character  of  holiness  ? 
Is  it  not  because  the  very  men  who  are  making  the 
world  wicked  ;  the  men  who  are  grinding  the  faces 
of  the  poor,  the  men  who  are  defiling  the  women 
and  corrupting  the  children,  are  in  the  churches, 
paying  the  expenses  of  the  churches,  hiring  the 
ministers,  and  entertaining  the  dignitaries  ?  I  do 
not  say  this  is  so ;  I  only  ask  with  fear  and 
trembling,  is  it  so? 

If  there  is  any  approach  to  such  a  condition  in 
the  Church,  then  the  whole  trouble  of  the  Church 
is  accounted  for.  She  sleeps  the  sleep  of  death 
because  she  does  not  discern  the  Lord's  body. 

It  is  useless  for  a  church  in  such  a  state  to 
administer  the  sacraments  to  those  who  are  within, 
or  to  offer  them  to  those  who  are  without. 

Sacraments  are  a  means  of  holiness  to  the  holy, 
just  as  bread  is  the  means  of  life  to  the  living.  If 
you  give  bread  to  a  dead  man  will  he  take  it  ?  If 
you  give  it  to  a  dying  man  will  it  not  kill  him  ? 

O  my  fathers  in  the  Lord  ;  O  my  brothers  and 
my    sisters,    if  you    want   to    unify    the   Church,  • 
purify  it.     The  wisdom  that  is  from  above  is  first 
pure,  then  peaceable.     Not  till  she  is  holy  can  she 
or  ought  she  to  prevail  in  the  world. 

In  these  latter  days  we  have  tried  every  device 
to  win  the  people  to  the  Church.  We  have  had 
fine  music  and  eloquent  preaching,  and  church 
teas  and  church  dances,  and  church  theatres,  and 


J2  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

I  know  not  what  sclieme  lias  been  left  untried  to 
attract  the  people. 

Some  of  us  have  thought  that  if  we  surrounded 
the  sacrament  with  beauty  and  dignit}'-,  with 
pomp  and  ceremony,  we  might  in  that  way  bring 
back  the  people  to  the  forsaken  altars  of  God. 

And  some  good  has  come  of  all  this  ;  the  revival 
of  ritual  has  been  a  help  to  devotion.  But,  alas  ! 
have  we  not  found  men  and  women  ever  ready  to 
substitute  the  holiness  of  beauty  for  the  beauty  of 
holiness. 

Now  that  we  have  tried  everything  else  and  found 
it  wanting,  why  not  try  again  that  which  was  so 
successful  in  the  days  of  our  Lord,  of  the  apostles, 
confessors  and  martyrs.  Let  us  try  holiness.  Let 
us  pray  God  to  give  us  back  again  the  white  stone 
and  the  new  name.  Let  us  think  of  ourselves 
and  of  all  Christian  men  and  women  as  holy  unto 
the  Lord.  Let  us  dare  to  use  again  the  name  so 
dear  to  Agnes,  to  Agatha,  to  Sixtus  and  to  Lau- 
rence, let  every  Christian  man  and  woman  humbly 
bow  his  head  and  say,  evw  enii  a'yioa  ev  rov  xp('(^'Tov 
Irjaov.      I  am  a  saint  in  Christ  Jesus. 

We  must  not  think  of  the  Saints  as  if,  like  the 
Ichthosauri,  they  were  an  extinct  race  of  men,  with 
shaven  heads  and  pinched  faces,  with  gown  and 
girdle  and  sandal  shoon,  men  and  women  useful 
for  purposes  of  ornament,  tQ  be  carved  into  statues 
and  painted  on  windows. 

We  must  think  of  them  as  men  and  women 
living  to-day ;  living  as  the  saints  of  God  always 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  yj 

have  lived,  little  in  the  eyes  of  the  world,  much  in 
the  eyes  of  God ;  living  some  of  them  lives  of  hard- 
ship at  the  wash-tub  and  the  work-bench ;  others 
with  their  children  and  fathers  bearing  the  heat 
and  burden  of  the  day  ;  some  of  them  with  the  vast 
responsibilities  of  riches  and  making  friends  of  the 
mammon  of  unrighteousness  ;  some  of  them  living 
at  home  and  some  homeless  tramps  abroad ;  some 
of  them  in  prison  and  some,  alas,  in  brothels,  for 
the  saints  of  God  are  sadly  lost  and  bewildered  at 
times. 

We  must  believe  that  this  is  not  the  devil's 
world,  but  God's  world,  and  God's  people  are  in  it. 
And  they  will  come  home  fast  enough  if  we  will 
only  keep  house  for  Him  and  the  doors  wide  open 
for  them. 

We  must  not  have  anything  in  the  Church  to 
frighten  the  saints  of  God.  The  Church  is  no 
place  for  the  display  of  wealth  or  pride  or  social 
precedence.  The  people  in  the  Church  must  as  a 
class  be  sweet  and  clean  and  merciful,  not  given 
to  much  wine,  no  strikers,  no  brawlers. 

Jesus  our  Lord  will  not  be  pleased  with  us  if 
we  are  at  great  pains  to  shepherd  the  goats  and 
leave  the  sheep  all  night  on  the  wold. 

And,  O  my  fathers  in  the  Lord,  bishops  and 
priests,  if  you  will  do  this  one  thing,  if  you  will  be 
holy  and  try  to  make  others  holy ;  if  when  you 
go  into  the  house  of  the  Lord,  the  bells  on  your 
garments  are  holiness  to  the  Lord ;  if  you  will 
give  your  whole  thought  as  to  how  you  may  best 


7^  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

sanctify  the  Lord  God  in  your  hearts,  I  am  prophet 
enough  to  tell  you,  that  without  might,  violence  or 
persuasion,  you  will  unify  the  Church  of  God. 
The  people  will  flock  to  your  churches  as  doves  to 
their  windows.  When  once  they  know  you  can 
heal  their  spiritual  diseases,  they  will  crowd  your 
doors  as  they  crowded  the  doors  of  the  house  at 
eventide  when  Christ  was  in  Capernaum. 

But,  as  you  value  your  life  in  God,  do  not 
offer  them  the  barren  sign  of  a  holiness,  when 
what  they  want  is  holiness  itself. 

Love  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  and  then  you  will 
love  the  people  and  the  people  will  love  you. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  STRENGTH  OF  BROTHERHOOD. 

In  his  letter  to  tlie  Colossians  S.  Paul  addresses 
them  as  the  saints  and  faithful  brethren  which  are 
at  Colosse ;  thus  joining  together  three  of  the 
great  names  by  which  the  Christians  were  known 
to  each  other.  And  this  last  name,  the  Brethren, 
01  ASeXcfyo I  ev  Tov  Irjaov  ^picTTov  is  the  name  which  S. 
Paul  uses  most  constantly  in  all  his  epistles.  He 
uses  it  of  himself.  He  loves  to  think  of  himself 
as  one  of  the  brethren  in  Christ  Jesus.  He  is  an 
apostle  of  the  Lord ;  he  has  great  and  wonderful 
gifts  ;  he  has  rendered  signal  service  to  the  Church, 
but  all  this  does  not  lift  him  out  of  the  ranks. 
He  does  not  because  he  is  a  great  man  and  a  use- 
ful man,  demand  for  himself  rights  and  privileges. 
He  is  not  above  any  man  nor  beneath  any  man. 
He  sits  in  unconscious  dignity,  and  makes  tents 
beside  Aquila  and  Priscilla,  and  talks  with  perfect 
ease  and  freedom  to  Agrippa  and  Bernice. 

S.  Paul  valued  the  principle  of  Brotherhood 
because  a  greater  than  he  had  come  among  men 
and  had  not  been  ashamed  to  call  them  brethren. 

The  Son  of  God,  when  he  came  into  the  world, 
was  careful  to  come  not  only  as  the  Son  of  God, 
but  also  as  the  Son  of  Man.  And  it  was  his  man- 
hood that  was  most  in  evidence  during  his  earthly 
life.  His  divinity  was  for  the  most  part  hidden, 
His  humanity  was  ever  in  sight. 


y6  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

In  all  things  He  was  anxious  to  share  the  com- 
mon lot  of  man.  He  was  born  indeed  of  royal 
blood,  but  that  royal  blood  had  flowed  obscurely 
and  now  ran  in  the  veins  of  the  carpenter  of 
Nazareth. 

Jesus  came  out  of  the  great  middle  class  which 
has  always  given  to  the  world  its  greatest  men. 
He  was  at  neither  extreme  of  the  social  scale ; 
neither  a  prince  nor  a  beggar.  He  was  a  common 
working  man. 

And  when  He  became  a  teacher,  He  did  not  affect 
the  teacher's  robes  nor  the  teacher's  titles.  He 
went  out  in  all  the  simplicity  of  His  early  life  and 
was  but  a  man  teaching  men.  He  was  not  by  His 
divine  nature  and  wonderful  spiritual  genius  lifted 
out  of  the  common  lot. 

He  walked  to  and  fro  in  the  earth,  He  was  tired, 
He  was  hungry,  He  was  sad,  He  was  glad.  He 
suffered  and  He  died  just  as  every  brother  man  of 
His  had  walked  and  grown  weary,  been  cold  and 
hungry,  had  smiled  and  wept,  had  suffered  and 
died  since  the  world  began. 

Now  it  was  not  without  purpose  that  God  sent 
His  Son  to  dwell  among  us ;  to  pitch  His  tent  as 
one  of  the  tents  of  Israel.* 

This  coming  of  Christ  to  be  one  of  us  was  an 
appeal  to  the  social  instinct  of  the  human  heart ; 
which  instinct  more  than  any  other  has  made  man 
what  he  is. 

It  is  the  instinct  which  has  built  up  the  family 

*  S.  John  i,  14. 


A    Voice  ill  the   Wilderness.  77 

and  the  state,  and  whicli  in  tliese  latter  days   God 
has  used  to  build  up  the  Church. 

Every  student  knows  what  a  mighty  part  the 
social  instinct  has  played  in  the  progress  of  man- 
kind. His  love  of  companionship  and  the  com- 
parative constancy  of  his  affections  is  that  which 
has  made  for  him  the  most  beneficent  of  all  his 
institutions,  the  institution  of  the  family. 

From  very  early  times  man  has  sought  the 
woman  not  only  for  the  gratification  of  his  appetite 
but  also  for  the  satisfaction  of  his  affection.  She 
is  not  only  his  mate,  she  is  his  companion. 

Marriage  as  a  permanent  relationship  belongs 
to  man. 

There  is  no  marriage  among  the  beasts.  Divorce 
is  easy  among  the  birds. 

The  children  born  to  the  man  and  his  wife  are 
first  their  jo}^,  and  then  their  care,  their  sorrow, 
and  their  solace.  The  long  infancy  and  youth  of 
mankind  welds  the  family. 

Those  who  live  for  years  together  must  learn  to 
know  each  other  and  to  love  each  other.  The  dog 
of  three  months  old  does  not  know  his  brother  dog, 
and  fights  him  as  a  stranger  in  the  streets.  But  a 
man  who  has  lived  for  years  with  a  fellow  man 
born  of  the  same  seed,  offspring  of  the  same  womb, 
cannot  soon  forget  that  fellow  man,  and  if  he  hates 
and  kills  him,  he  hates  and  kills  not  a  stranger,  but 
a  brother,  and  it  is  his  brother's  blood  that  cries 
from  the  ground. 

During  all  those  long  ages  before  what  we  call 


7<?  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

civilization  began  to  be,  while  men  were  wandering 
in  small  companies  about  the  earth,  the  family,  was 
the  unit  of  social  organization.  Brothers  lived 
together  under  the  rule  of  the  father,  not  only  for 
a  few  years  but  all  their  lives  ;  children  and  grand- 
children made  up  the  common  family. 

And  as  different  families  came  together  in  con- 
flict, brother  had  to  fight  for  brother  in  defence  of 
the  common  safety,  so  that  when  man  came  forth 
from  that  first  formative  state  he  brought  with  him 
the  instinct  of  brotherhood  as  one  of  the  strongest 
instincts  of  his  nature. 

And  as  the  family  grew  into  the  tribe  and  the 
tribe  into  the  nation,  the  idea  of  brotherhood  was 
made  to  cover  those  larger  relationships.  The 
Greek  was  the  brother  to  every  other  Greek,  and 
when  our  Lord  would  excuse  Himself  from  going 
to  dine  with  Zaccheus,  of  whom  the  people  mur- 
mured and  said  "  he  was  a  man  that  was  a  sinner," 
Jesus  said  "  this  day  is  salvation  come  to  this  house, 
forasmuch  as  he  also  is  child  of  Abraham ;"  thus 
appealing  to  the  instinct  of  brotherhood.  No  one 
could  deny  the  right  of  a  brother  to  help  a 
brother. 

What  the  Christian  ideal  did  was  to  make  the 
brotherly  relation  universal.  It  grasped  the  very 
simple  fact  that  the  common  nature  of  man  proves 
a  common  origin ;  that  all  men  can  at  last  be 
traced  to  a  single  stock,  and  so  in  a  wide  but  true 
sense  all  men  must  be  brethren. 

The  Christian  ideal  carried  the  origin   of  man 


A    Voice  ill  the   Wilderness.  yg 

back  to  its  ultimate  source.  It  found  the  origin 
not  in  man  but  in  God.  It  was  the  common  father- 
hood of  God  which  made  the  common  brotherhood 
of  man.  So  when  a  man  was  in  distress  the 
Christian  would  turn  aside  and  help  him,  and  in 
excuse  would  say  of  him  :  "he  also  is  a  child  of 
God." 

And  it  was  time  for  this  new  conception  of 
brotherhood  to  enter  the  world.  It  was  necessary 
for  the  world  to  take  some  wider  and  more  univer- 
sal conception  of  the  brotherhood  of  man,  or 
brotherhood  itself  would  perish  and  the  world 
perish  with  it. 

The  brotherhood  of  the  family  had  been  lost  in 
that  of  the  tribe,  the  brotherhood  of  the  tribe  had 
been  merged  in  that  of  the  nation,  and  now 
nationalism  itself  had  been  lost  in  the  universalism 
of  the  Roman  Empire. 

And  the  Roman  Empire  was  only  the  cover  for 
the  most  intense  and  competitive  individualism 
that  the  world  has  ever  seen. 

During  the  last  days  of  the  Republic  competi- 
tion had  done  its  perfect  work.  Individualism  was 
everywhere  rampant.  The  family  relation  was 
gone.  The  men  of  Rome  mated  like  creatures  of 
the  air  and  the  field,  a  man  would  find  his  solace 
with  a  concubine  like  a  beast,  and  divorce  his  wife 
with  more  than  the  facility  of  a  bird. 

He  did  not  know  his  own  children.     They  were 
the  offspring  of  obscure  amours,  often  children  of 
slave  girls  whom  their  father  sold  in  the  market. 
6 


8o  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

Unless  one  has  studied  the  subject  he  can  have 
no  conception  of  the  utter  dissolution  of  the  family 
that  came  to  pass  immediately  after  the  great  civil 
wars  of  Marius  and  Sulla. 

The  tribal  relation  had  long  since  passed  away, 
and  by  reason  of  the  Roman  conquest  the  nations 
has  ceased  to  exist.  And  now  the  Roman  Repub- 
lic was  only  a  name.  It  was  a  mere  cover  for  indi- 
vidual enterprise,  an  instrument  for  the  benefit  of 
individual  greed. 

There  was  no  longer  any  res  publica^  there  was 
only  res  privita.  The  Roman  aristocracy  fought 
for  pro-consulships  in  the  senate,  that  a  man  might 
go  to  Syria  or  to  Egypt,  where,  in  two  years,  he 
would  wring  from  a  despairing  people  wealth 
enough  to  come  back  to  Rome  and  build  marble 
palaces  by  the  thousand  feet,  and  spend  ten  thou- 
sand sesterce  on  a  dinner. 

This  went  on  until  Cains  Julius  Caesar  carried 
individualism  to  its  logical  issue  and  gathered  the 
whole  accumulated  power  of  the  Roman  world  into 
the  hands  of  one  man. 

The  work  of  Caesar  was  the  inevitable  result  of 
what  had  gone  before.  He  had  to  fight  with  the 
aristocracy  for  his  share  of  the  plunder.  He  was 
stronger  than  they,  beat  them  and  took  it  all. 

Caesarism  was  the  ultimate  triumph  of  individ- 
ualism. Caesar  calmly  assumed  the  ownership  of 
the  world  as  a  personal  possession. 

What  Caesar  secured  by  force,  Octavianus  held 
by  craft,  and  secured  the  world  as  an  inheritance 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  8i 

in  the  Claudian-Julian  families.  From  Augustus 
the  world  passed  by  descent  to  Tiberius,  and 
from  him  went  down  the  line  to  Cains,  Claudius 
and  Nero,  who  used  the  world  as  a  very  little 
thing  to  gorge  their  appetites  and  to  glut  their 
cruelty. 

The  result  of  all  this  was  to  reduce  the  Roman 
world  to  a  state  of  miserable,  degrading  dependence. 
Manhood  was  gone.  It  followed  the  state  and  the 
tribe  into  the  maw  of  competitive  individualism. 

At  the  bottom  of  social  scale  was  the  slave  de- 
pendent upon  his  master  for  life,  compelled  to  sub- 
mit to  every  caprice ;  obliged  to  yield  his  body  to 
dishonor  and  outrage.  Next  after  him  came  the 
freedman,  hardly  better  than  the  slave,  the  pimp 
of  his  patron,  doing  the  meanest  actions  for  the 
smallest  reward.  There  was  a  crowd  of  debtors 
living  in  daily  dread  of  creditors,  who  might  at 
will  send  them  to  imprisonment  and  to  slavery. 
The  cities  were  crowded  with  an  idle  rabble,  which 
the  ruin  of  husbandry  had  driven  from  the  coun- 
try, parasites  eating  out  the  heart  of  the  common- 
wealth, crying  for  free  bread  and  free  shows. 

At  the  top  of  the  social  world  was  the  senator, 
the  knight  and  the  publican  spending  his  days  in 
fawning  on  the  Caesar,  his  nights  in  a  feverish 
debauch ;  fearing  every  hour  that  Caesar  would 
rob  him  of  wealth  and  of  life. 

It  was  into  such  a  world  as  this,  that  the  Kingdom 
of  God  came  with  its  ideal  of  universal  brotherhood, 
and  in  the  Christian   Church   of  the  second  and 


82  A    Voice  in  the   Wi/derfiess. 

third  centuries  the  Roman  world  recovered  its  lost 
manhood. 

In  the  Christian  community  there  was  law, 
order,  self-respect.  There  was  jiistice  and  piety 
and  wholesome  love. 

Some  poor  slave  beaten  by  his  master,  would 
escape  in  the  night  and  go  early  in  the  morning  to 
a  Christian  assembly.  There  he  would  be  greeted 
by  a  clasp  of  the  hand :  he  would  hear  from  the 
lips  perhaps  of  some  patrician  the  word  brother ; 
that  word  would  send  a  thrill  of  joy  to  his  heart. 
He  was  no  longer  a  slave  of  man,  but  a  brother  of 
man. 

Then  the  brethren  would  take  him  and  wash  his 
wounds  and  tell  him  not  to  be  ashamed,  for  the  Son 
of  God  had  suffered  like  things. 

Some  poor  slave  girl  would  drag  her  outraged 
body  to  the  Christian  Church  and  there  hear  how 
Jesus  had  been  put  to  open  shame,  and  in  the 
Church  find  the  purity  of  which  she  had  been 
robbed  in  the  world. 

Some  matron  fleeing  from  Caesar's  lust,  some 
man  of  consular  rank  from  his  degrading  friend- 
ship, would  find  in  the  company  of  the  Christian 
Community  the  personal  decency  and  dignity 
which  the  heart  craved  as  the  necessity  of  life. 
So  the  Brotherhood  increased  and  multiplied  until 
it  was  the  mightiest  force  in  the  Roman  world. 

This  brotherhood,  because  it  was  a  brotherhood, 
was  a  society  in  which  every  man  was  the  equal  of 
every  man. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  8j 

And  this  brotherhood  was  and  is  the  source  from 
which  all  episcopates  derive  their  being  and  their 
power  in  the  Church.  The  brotherhood  does  not 
exist  for  the  episcopate,  but  the  episcopate  for  the 
brotherhood. 

Christ  our  Lord  gave  the  Christian  brotherhood 
existence.  His  divine  Sonship-  is  that  in  which 
all  human  sonship  centers.  He  brought  us  home 
to  His  Father  and  our  Father,  and  on  that  fact 
of  Divine  Fatherhood  human  brotherhood  was 
based. 

The  Church  crystallized  round  about  Jesus 
Christ.  He  was  the  Shepherd  of  the  sheep  ;  Apos- 
tles were  sent  to  seek  the  sheep  and  bring  them  to 
the  fold ;  Bishops  were  appointed  to  watch  the  sheep 
and  keep  them  in  the  fold.  The  Bishops  were,  as 
their  name  implies,  watchmen,  guardians,  overseers. 

Neither  Jesus  Christ,  nor  the  Apostles,  nor  the 
Bishops,  are  by  of&ce,  dignity  or  wealth  or  social 
importance,  separated  from  the  brethren.  They 
are  simply  brothers  doing  certain  duties. 

Now  in  the  course  of  time,  notions  of  rank  and 
heirarchy  have  grown  up  in  the  Christian  Church. 
Men  speak  of  authority,  power  and  rule. 

But  all  this  is  contrary  to  the  first  principles  of 
the  Constitution  of  the  Christian  Church  and  is 
destructive  of  the  Brotherhood. 

There  is  no  opinion  that  has  done  so  much  harm 
to  the  Church  as  the  doctrine  that  bishops  and 
priests  are  appointed  to  rule  in  the  Church  as  kings 
and  magistrates  rule  in  the  world. 


8/j.  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

This  lias  been  and  is  tlie  cause  of  discord,  dis- 
order and  disunion.  It  has  filled  the  heart  of  the 
Bishop  of  Rome  with  the  conceit  that  God  has  given 
him  authority  in  the  world,  to  govern  the  world,  to 
rule  the  thoughts  and  lives  of  men.  It  has  turned 
the  head  of  many  a  bishop  and  given  him  notions 
of  episcopal  power  which  have  made  him  a  lord  in 
the  earth ;  it  has  given  many  a  parish  priest  airs 
of  authority  destructive  of  all  personal  influ- 
ence. 

If  there  is  any  one  thing  perfectly  clear  in  our 
Lord's  teaching,  it  is  that  a  bishop  or  successor  of 
the  apostles  is  to  have  no  authority  or  rule  what- 
ever. He  is  not  appointed  to  rule,  he  is  appointed 
to  serve. 

This  whole  matter  of  dominion  or  authority  was 
decided  by  our  Lord  in  the  case  of  Zebedee's  chil- 
dren. When  the  ambitious  mother  of  those  young 
men  asked  that  one  of  them  might  sit  on  the  right 
hand  and  the  other  on  the  left  of  the  Lord  in  His 
Kingdom,  and  the  ten  were  moved  to  indignation, 
Jesus  called  them  unto  Him  and  said,  "  Ye  know 
that  the  princes  of  the  Gentiles  exercise  dominion 
over  them  and  they  that  are  great  exercise  authority 
upon  them.  But  it  shall  not  be  so  among  you,  but 
whosoever  will  be  great  among  you  let  him  be  your 
minister,  and  whosoever  will  be  chief  among  you 
let  him  be  your  servant."* 

If  words  mean  anything  at  all,  our  Lord  expressly 
withheld  dominion  and  authority  from  the  apostle- 

*  Servant  and  minister  are  the  same.      S.  Math,  xx,  25,  26. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  85 

sHp,  and  necessarily  from  the  episcopate :  He  con- 
ferred upon  it  tlie  duty  of  oversight  and  service. 

It  was  clearly  our  Lord's  hope  and  purpose  that 
ambition  for  place,  and  pride  of  power  should  be 
banished  from  His  Church.  How  that  hope  has 
been  disappointed  ;  that  purpose  defeated  ;  history 
too  sadly  tells. 

Because  of  the  usurpation  by  the  Bishops  in 
times  past  of  secular  power  and  authority,  because 
they  have  been  princes  in  the  earth,  there  has 
grown  up  round  the  Episcopal  office  a  tradition  of 
dominion,  power  and  authority  that  places  the 
Bishops  in  the  highest  seats  of  authority  among 
men.  In  many  countries,  the  Bishop  gives  place 
only  to  royalty  itself,  and  even  that  he  gives 
grudgingly.  For  a  long  time  the  Bishops  were 
engaged  in  a  life  and  death  struggle  with  emperors, 
kings  and  princes  for  the  mastery  of  the  temporal 
world.  They  tried  to  exercise  the  miraculous 
power  of  a  Moses ;  they  wished  to  change  their 
pastoral  staff  into  a  scepter,  their  mitre  into  a 
crown. 

This  struggle  of  the  Christian  priesthood  for 
temporal  power  is  the  tragedy  of  the  Church.  It 
wasted  her  life,  and  lost  her  the  spiritual  leader- 
ship of  man. 

The  Bishops  were  beaten  in  their  impious  attempt 
to  grasp  temporal  power ;  they  were  subordinated 
by  the  kings,  and  then  they  became  the  allies  and 
the  servants  of  their  former  enemies. 

The  kings  made  use  of  the  bishops  to  buttress 


86  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

their  own  absolute  and  irresponsible  power.  The 
kings  of  tlie  eartb  gave  to  the  Bishops  of  tbe 
Churcli  much  earthly  power  and  dignity,  but  only 
on  condition  that  they  would  hold  it  subject  to  the 
royal  prerogative.  And  in  many  countries  the 
bishops  to-day  are  in  this  state  of  exalted  subordi- 
nation. They  hold  the  position  in  the  world  which 
is  given  them  in  the  game  of  chess.  On  the  chess 
board  the  bishops  stand  next  the  king  and  queen, 
having  it  as  their  special  duty  to  guard  those  sacred 
personages.  So  that  in  the  eyes  of  men  the  of&ce 
of  a  bishop  has  become  a  secular  of&ce,  of  great 
power  and  dignity  and  social  importance,  having 
for  its  chief  duty  the  guarding  and  conserving  of 
the  secular  power. 

This  conception  of  the  of&ce  is  deep-rooted  in  the 
mind  of  the  English-speaking  people.  It  is  the 
heritage  of  a  thousand  years  of  Episcopal  life  and 
rule  in  the  English  Church. 

We  have  just  been  reading  of  the  enthronization 
of  an  archbishop.  He  has  entered  upon  the  rights 
and  privileges  of  his  see.  He  was  seated  upon 
his  throne  with  all  the  pomp  and  pageantry  of  a 
royal  coronation. 

This  man  is  by  courtesy  the  first  subject  of  the 
British  Empire  ;  he  has  the  revenues  of  a  prince ; 
he  has  his  palace  in  his  diocese,  and  his  palace  in 
London.  Men  bow  down  to  him  and  give  him 
titles  of  honor.  He  takes  precedence  in  all  social 
functions.  He  goes  into  dinner  before  dukes  and 
earls,  next  after  the  Prince  of  Wales. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  Sy 

Now  all  this  charms  the  popular  imagination, 
but  it  has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the  Church 
of  God. 

As  a  Bishop  in  the  Church  of  God  this  man  has 
no  right  to  dignity,  honor,  precedence  or  wealth. 
These  things  do  not  belong  rightfully  to  the  King- 
dom of  God ;  they  have  no  place  in  it.  A  Bishop 
in  the  Church  of  God  has  only  one  right  and  one 
privilege.  He  has  the  right  of  service  and  the 
privilege  of  sacrifice. 

This  is  the  only  right  and  privilege  which  the 
Lord  Jesus  Christ  enjoyed,  the  only  right  and 
privilege  of  S.  Paul.  To  watch  for  the  people  and 
to  die  for  the  people  the  only  right  and  privilege 
of  the  Bishop  of  the  primitive  Church.  I  do  not 
expect  any  words  of  mine  to  disturb  the  peace  of 
the  English  establishment,  nor  do  I  wish  to  disturb 
that  peace. '^  But  if  my  words  can  reach  the  ears 
of  the  American  Bpiscopate,  I  want  to  say  to  them 
in  all  humbleness  and  yet  in  all  boldness,  that 
nothing  like  the  English  establishment  can  be  set 
up  in  this  country;  our  Bishops  must  be  bishops, 
not  princes  or  lords. 

*  The  English  Estabhshment  is  the  creation  of  Divine  Providence, 
and  has  served  a  providential  purpose.  When  that  purpose  is  accom- 
plished, the  establishment  as  an  institution  will  pass  away. 

The  Bishops  themselves  are  doing  all  they  can  to  advance  the  cause 
of  disestablishment,  to  prepare  for  what  must  come,  to  get  ready  for 
a  Free  Church  in  a  Free  State  :  the  divisions  of  Dioceses,  the  crea- 
tion of  Episcopates  with  purely  spiritual  functions,  are  steps  toward 
the  separation  of  Church  and  State.  When  there  are  a  large  number 
of  Bishops  who  are  not  and  cannot  be  called  to  the  house  of  Lords,  the 
establishment  will  pass  away.  The  most  spiritual  of  the  Bishops  will 
be  its  enemies. 


88  A    Voice  in  the    Wilderness. 

Even  in  the  world  princedom  is  doomed ;  in 
Western  Europe  it  is  only  a  survival ;  in  America 
it  has  never  had  any  existence.  The  great  prin- 
ciple of  our  Lord  and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ  is  now 
the  accepted  principle  of  government  in  the  most 
enlightened  nations  of  the  earth. 

The  Chief  Magistrate  of  the  second  greatest 
nation  in  the  world  is  simply  a  citizen  holding  a 
public  of&ce.  He  comes  from  the  people,  he 
returns  to  the  people,  he  is  not  their  lord  but  their 
servant. 

This  is  not  the  age  of  princes  but  of  peoples,  and 
it  is  not  simply  a  passing  age ;  it  is  a  clearly 
defined  period  in  human  progress.  The  time  has 
come  when  the  Church  must  rest  her  claim  upon 
somewhat  besides  Apostolic  succession.  Mere  suc- 
cession cannot  save  and  never  did  save.  Hilderick 
was  the  successor  of  Hlodowig,  and  Karl  the  Gross 
of  Karl  the  Great,  but  succession  did  not  save 
Hilderick  from  the  monastery,  nor  Karl  the  Gross 
from  the  dismemberment  of  his  empire.  There  is 
no  case  on  record  where  Apostolic  succession  saved 
a  wicked  Church  or  a  faithless  Church  from  the 
consequences  of  wickedness  and  faithlessness. 

From  this  time  forth  stress  must  be  laid  not 
upon  the  episcopate,  but  upon  the  brotherhood. 

And  surely  the  day  has  come  for  a  new  birth  of 
the  idea  of  Christian  brotherhood.  It  is  this  and 
this  only  that  can  save  the  modern  world  as  it 
saved  the  ancient  world. 

Once  more  we  see  an  intense  competitive  indi- 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  8g 

vidualism  breaking  down  tlie  safeguards  of  human 
life.  Throughout  western  Christendom  there  is  a 
condition  somewhat  like  that  of  Rome  under  the 
empire. 

The  ties  of  the  family  are  loosened,  marriages 
decrease,  divorces  increase,  children  scatter  and 
soon  forget  each  other.  Nationalism  is  fast  losing 
its  hold  as  a  rational  and  controlling  principle. 
Commerce  and  travel  are  making  of  the  world  one 
great  country. 

Accumulated  capital  is  in  a  measure  playing  the 
part  of  the  Roman  army ;  it  is  concentrating  the 
forces  of  the  world  in  the  hands  of  a  few. 

The  division  of  labor  and  the  introduction  of 
machinery  has  changed  the  condition  of  the  work- 
man from  a  state  of  comparative  freedom  to  a  state 
of  dependence.  It  has  reduced  his  individual 
efficiency  just  in  proportion  that  it  has  increased 
his  corporate  efficiency.  He  is  a  part,  and  a  very 
small  part,  of  a  machine. 

The  vast  mass  of  the  people  do  not  share  fairly 
in  the  average  prosperity  of  the  community.  We 
have  learned  how  to  multiply.  We  do  not  know 
how  to  divide.  The  earth  is  glutted  with  abund- 
ance while  multitudes  are  starving. 

Now  what  we  need  is  an  episcopate  that  will  see 
this  world  as  the  primitive  episcopate  saw  the 
Roman  world. 

When  some  workman  is  sent  from  his  place 
without  thought  or  feeling,  warning,  or  help,  sent 
to  what  must  soon  be  a  dreary  home  with  discon- 


go  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

solate  wife  and  hungry  children,  the  Church  should 
be  there  with  the  bishop  at  the  door  to  receive  and 
comfort  him.  To  find,  if  possible,  the  reason  for 
his  dismissal  and  to  rebuke,  if  need  be,  the  cold- 
hearted  men  who  sent  him  away. 

And  when  the  men  themselves,  through  ignor- 
ance and  wickedness,  rise  up  against  their  masters 
and  destroy  the  industry  by  which  they  themselves 
live,  then  they  should  hear  the  voice  of  their 
bishop  calling  them  back  to  reason. 

There  is  nothing  extravagant  in  the  supposition 
that  there  might  be  in  every  city  a  man  of  God 
whose  word  would  have  power  to  stay  the  passions 
and  guide  the  lives  of  men. 

The  present  writer  will  never  forget  a  scene 
which  he  witnessed  not  many  years  ago.  He  was 
visiting  a  venerated  and  holy  priest  of  the  Church  ; 
this  priest  was  old  and  feeble,  simple  and  inoffen- 
sive, and  a  public  official  came  to  see  him,  a  strong 
man  in  the  prime  of  life  and  in  the  pride  of  high 
station,  and  this  man  stood  before  the  feeble  priest, 
striving  to  justify  himself  concerning  a  charge  of 
misconduct  which  this  priest  had  brought  against 
him. 

In  this  incident  was  revealed  the  moral  and 
spiritual  power  which  always  has  been  and  always 
will  be  the  strength  of  the  ministry  of  the  Church. 

And  this  is  the  power  that  we  crave  for  the  epis- 
copate. But  this  power  can  be  had  only  when  the 
episcopate  identifies  itself  once  more  with  the  great 
commonalty ;    when   it  takes  its  place  once  more 


A    Voice  in  the    Wilderness.  gi 

in  the  midst  of  the  people,  thinking  of  them  and 
speaking  for  them. 

In  contrast  with  the  incident  mentioned  above  is 
another  which  came  under  my  observation  at  about 
the  same  time. 

I  was  visiting  in  one  of  our  larger  cities,  and 
at  the  invitation  of  the  bishop  and  clergy,  met 
with  them  to  discuss  the  matter  of  Christian 
unity.  For  three  days  that  city  had  been  in  the 
hands  of  a  mob.  Mad,  wild  men  were  beating 
against  the  circumstances  of  their  life.  While 
this  storm  was  raging  in  the  streets,  we,  the 
bishops  and  clergy,  were  calmly,  in  our  little  room, 
discussing  our  powers  and  privileges  as  bishops  and 
priests  of  the  Holy  Catholic  Church.  We  asserted, 
I  remember,  our  rights  as  the  only  true  shepherds 
of  the  people  of  God  in  this  land.  Meanwhile  the 
storm  raged  on  in  the  streets  as  regardless  of  us 
as  if  we  had  been  the  mummy  of  Ramases  deep 
hid  in  the  heart  of  the  Pyramids. 

Never  to  my  mind  was  there  a  more  glaring  and 
pitiful  a  contrast  between  a  claim  and  a  reality 
than  when  we  that  morning  claimed  to  be  the  sole 
shepherds  of  a  people  upon  whose  agony  we  looked 
with  calm  indifference.  When  it  was  suggested 
that  if  we  had  the  power  to  guide  the  American 
people,  now  was  the  time  to  use  it ;  it  was  at 
once  answered  to  that  suggestion  that  the  mob 
outside  were  not  subject  to  our  guidance;  they 
were  not  Protestant  Episcopalians. 

Such  a  conception  of  the  Shepherd's  of&ce  was 


g2  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

not  that  whicti  filled  the  heart  of  the  Great  Shep- 
herd and  Bishop  of  onr  souls,  when  "  He  had  com- 
passion on  the  multitude  because  they  were  as  sheep 
scattered  abroad,  having  no  shepherd,"  and  until  we 
have  the  mind  of  the  Master  we  can  never  fill  the 
place  of  the  Master. 

When  the  overseers  see  where  the  people  ought 
to  go,  and  guide  them  in  the  way,  then  we  shall 
have  no  need  of  an  appeal  to  the  past  for  our 
authority.  Men  will  hear  that  authority  in  our 
voice,  and  see  it  in  our  lives. 

Such  an  episcopate  will  rule  simply  because  it 
leads. 

CONCLUSION. 

We  have  now  traversed  the  great  subject  pre- 
sented for  our  consideration.  We  have  endeavored 
to  trace  back  to  their  origin  in  the  spiritual  world 
those  outward  and  visible  organs  which  the  bishops 
of  the  Anglo-American  Communion  consider  the 
instruments  best  adapted  to  bring  peace  once  more 
to  the  Church. 

And  in  this  we  say  the  bishops  have  judged 
wisely  and  well.  But  these  organs  to  have  any 
life  or  force  must  be  in  vital  union  with  the  soul  of 
man. 

The  Holy  Scriptures  must  find  their  inspiration 
not  in  their  own  pages,  nor  in  the  decrees  of  any 
council  or  sanhedrin,  but  their  inspiration  must  be 
in  the  heart  of  him  who  hears  them.  The  cry 
must  be  "  He  that  hath  ears  to  hear  let  him  hear," 


A    Voice  m  the   Wilderness.  gj 

and  if  the  bishops  and  the  Church  would  have  men 
hear  the  voice  of  God,  they  must  speak  with  the 
voice  of  God. 

The  creeds  must  find  their  origin  not  in  the 
enactment  of  some  body  of  men  who  met  centuries 
ago,  to  determine  what  men  should  forever  after 
believe ;  these  creeds  must  have  their  origin  and 
spring  to-day  in  that  principle  of  faithfulness, 
loyalty  and  devotion  to  Jesus  Christ  which  gave 
them  existence  a  thousand  years  ago. 

The  creed  must  be  new  born  in  the  heart  of  every 
believer. 

The  sacraments  must  not  be  looked  upon  as 
charms  which  will  of  themselves  work  wonders, 
but  as  the  means  of  that  union  which  is  between 
the  soul  and  God,  "  a  means  of  holiness  to  the 
holy." 

Nor  is  the  episcopate  to  be  considered  as  a  sepa- 
rate order  of  men  who  are  appointed  to  rule  in  the 
church.  They  are  men  chosen  from  the  brethren 
"  to  take  heed  unto  themselves  and  to  all  the  flock 
over  which  the  Holy  Ghost  hath  made  them  over- 
seers, to  feed  the  Church  of  God  which  He  hath 
purchased  with  His  own  blood."* 

Now  if  the  great  Anglican  Communion  simply 
makes  its  own  the  rule  that  it  offers  to  others ;  if 
it  hears  and  obeys  the  voice  of  God ;  if  it  is  faithful 
to  Christ  Jesus  and  holy  unto  the  Lord ;  if  its 
ministry  is  a  ministry  serving  God  and  the  people  ; 
daring   to   bear   witness   to    God   and    his    right- 

*  Acts  XX,  28. 


g/j.  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

eousness  "  even  before  kings,"  then  this  Cliurcli 
will  not  need  to  wait  upon  the  motion  of  other 
religious  bodies ;  it  will  but  need  to  show  itself  to 
the  people  and  the  people  will  follow  it,  and  the 
Church  will  be  one  again  in  that  vital  unity  which 
comes  of  a  common  thought  and  a  common  life. 

But  let  us  beware  how  we  give  the  shell  out  of 
which  the  meat  is  gone. 

We  must  be  careful  not  to  confound  the  out- 
ward and  accidental  with  the  inward  and  essential. 
There  are  in  the  history  of  man's  redemption  only 
two  permanent  factors. 

Papacies,  prelacies,  patriarchates :  these  all 
change  and  pass  away.  Church  governments  are 
but  for  a  season  and  a  time.  Books  have  their  days 
of  power  and  their  days  of  weakness :  Rituals  are 
subject  to  use  and  disuse.  Only  two  forces  are  per- 
manent, working  on  from  age  to  age  to  accomplish 
the  task  of  bringing  in  the  kingdom  of  everlasting 
righteousness ;  these  two  forces  ever  working  and 
ever  the  same  are  God  and  the  people  of  God. 


BOOK  SECOND. 

THE  OFFICE  AND  WORK  OF  A  BISHOP 
IN  THE  CHURCH  OF  GOD 


BEING  AN  ARGUMENT  FOR  THE  DIVISION  OF  THE  DIOCESE  OF 
WESTERN  NEW  YORK,  ADDRESSED  TO  THE  RIGHT  REVEREND 
WILWAM  DAVID  WAI,KER,  D.D.,  I,I..D.,  D.CX.,  BISHOP  OF  SAID 
DIOCESE,  AND  HERE  PUBLISHED  AND  ADDRESSED  TO  THE 
CHURCH  THROUGHOUT  THE  WORI.D  AS  A  PI^EA  FOR  THE 
RESTORATION  OF  THE   PRIMITIVE  EPISCOPATE. 


CONTENTS. 

Page 
Introduction, 97 

Chapter  I. 

Argument  from  Expediency,  .....         99 

Chapter  II. 

The  Origin  of  the  Episcopal  Office,         ....       107 

Chapter  III. 

The  History  of  the  Episcopate, ill 

Chapter  IV.  * 

The  Dut}^  of  Oversight, 119 

Chapter  V. 

The  Power  of  Personal  Influence,    .....       123 

Chapter  VI. 

The  Center  of  Unity, 126 

Chapter  VII. 

The  American  Episcopate, 134 

Chapter  VIII. 

Pastor  Pastorum 142 

Chapter  IX. 

Endowment, 145 

Chapter  X. 

The  Practical  Plan, 151 

Conclusion, 152 

7 


NOTE  TO  THE    OFFICE    AND  WORK   OF  A 
BISHOP  IN  THE  CHURCH  OF  GOD. 


A  reissue  of  this  tract  having  been  called  for,  I 
publish  it  in  this  volume  without  material  change. 
Some  have  thought  that  it  might  be  better  to  take 
away  its  local  color  and  make  it  a  more  abstract  and 
general  argument. 

But  this  I  find  myself  unable  to  do.  The  argument 
took  force  and  form  in  my  own  mind  from  the  local 
circumstances  which  called  it  forth.  It  argues  what 
the  lawyers  would  call  a  case.  The  principles  illus- 
trated and  enforced  in  this  particular  case  apply  to  all 
like  cases,  and  it  seems  to  me  are  the  stronger  and 
more  telling  because  they  are  particular  and  not  gen- 
eral and  abstract. 

The  argument  has  commended  itself  to  some  of  the 
best  minds  in  the  Church,  and  there  is  a  feeling  abroad 
that  it  is  in  this  direction  of  organization  that  the 
Church  must  live  and  work  for  some  time  to  come. 


THE  OFFICE  AND  WORK  OF  A  BISHOP 
IN  THE  CHURCH  OF  GOD. 

Being  an  Argument  for  the  Division  of  the  Diocese  of  Western  New 

York,  Addressed  to  the  Right  Rev.  William  David  Walker, 

D.D.,  LL.D.,  D.C.L.,  Bishop  of  said  Diocese. 

Right  Reverend  and  Dear  Bishop : 

At  the  special  council  of  tlie  Diocese  of  Western 
New  York,  held,  in  the  city  of  Buffalo  on  the  6th 
of  October  last,  at  which  council  you  were  happily 
elected  to  the  Bishopric  of  the  Diocese,  I  submit- 
ted a  series  of  resolutions  calling  for  a  division  of 
the  Diocese  in  1898,  and  providing  for  a  postpone- 
ment of  the  election  of  a  Bishop  until  such  division 
was  consummated.  • 

These  resolutions  the  council  did  not  deem  it 
wise  to  consider,  the  majority  being  of  the  opinion 
that  the  interests  of  the  church  demanded  the 
immediate  presence  and  oversight  of  a  Bishop. 
In  that  opinion  of  the  council  I  cheerfully  acqui- 
esced, although  I  then  thought,  and  still  think, 
that  a  full  and  free  discussion  of  the  conditions  of 
the  Diocese  might  well  have  preceded  an  election 
of  its  Bishop. 

But  we  must  and  do  believe  that  the  action  of 
the  council  was  overruled  by  the  Spirit  of  God, 
and  that  it  is  His  will  that  you  should  come  to  us 
as  our  spiritual  head. 


g8  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

Assuring  you  of  my  own  entire  loyalty  and 
devotion,  and  of  my  purpose  in  all  things  to  sub- 
mit to  your  authority,  and  of  my  intention  to  do 
all  I  can  to  further  the  peace  and  prosperity  of  the 
Church  of  God,  I  beg  to  lay  before  you,  as  before 
a  court  of  appeal,  my  reasons  for  believing  a  divis- 
ion of  the  Diocese  of  Western  New  York  necessary 
to  the  well-being  of  the  church  in  this  part  of  the 
world. 


CHAPTER   I. 

ARGUMENT   FROM    EXPEDIENCY. 

I  BASE  my  argument  for  this  measure  first  upon 
expediency  and  then  upon  principle,  and  I  think 
we  shall  find  that  the  expediency  arises  out  of  the 
nature  of  the  principle.  I  deem  it  wise  and  expe- 
dient that  the  Diocese  should  be  divided,  because  it 
contains  two  important  and  distinct  centers  of  life. 
At  the  western  end  of  the  diocese  lies  the  city  of 
Buffalo,  the  third  city  in  the  State  of  New  York, 
and  one  of  the  larger  cities  of  the  country  and  of 
the  world.  It  lies  at  the  foot  of  the  great  lakes, 
and  is  the  receiving  port  of  the  commerce  that  is 
shipped  over  those  vast  inland  waters.  Its  ship- 
ping interest  alone  secures  for  it  a  permanent  and 
ever-increasing  prosperity.  But  besides  this  it  has 
a  vast  system  of  railroads,  carrying  its  people  and 
its  goods  to  and  from  all  parts  of  the  world.  It  is 
now,  and  is  destined  always  to  be,  a  city  of  facto- 
ries and  shops,  as  well  as  a  city  of  stores,  ware- 
houses and  elevators.  It  is  already  one  of  the 
larger  manufacturing  centers  of  the  country,  and 
the  recent  introduction  of  the  almost  unlimited 
electrical  power  that  is  generated  by  the  Niagara 
river  must  give  it  an  advantage  that  will  attract  to 
it  industries  from  every  part  of  the  globe. 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  in  twenty  years  there  will 
be  living  in  and  about  the  city  of  Buffalo,  within  a 
radius  of  twenty-five  miles  of  its  city  hall,  a  popu- 


100  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

lation  of  not  less  than  seven  hundred  thousand 
souls.  This  population  will  come  from  every  land 
on  the  face  of  the  earth,  and  will  present  problems 
for  solution  to  both  church  and  state  that  will  tax 
the  wisest  statesmanship,  and  the  most  devoted 
churchmanship. 

The  city  of  Buffalo  is  already  a  great  center  of 
wealth,  culture,  learning  and  religion.  Its  public 
and  private  buildings  vie  in  dignity  and  beauty 
with  the  public  and  private  buildings  of  the  world. 
It  has  hundreds  of  churches  and  schools.  Our 
great  civilization  has  done  and  is  doing  all  that  it 
can  to  make  this  one  of  the  most  attractive  places 
to  live  in  in  this  country. 

Now  every  argument  from  expediency  marks 
out  this  city  as  a  center  of  church  life  and  work. 
Here,  if  anywhere  in  the  wide  world,  a  Bishop 
should  have  his  seat,  and  exercise  all  the  power 
and  influence  of  his  sacred  of&ce.  And  he  will 
find  in  this  city  alone  work  enough  to  fill  all  his 
time  and  take  all  his  strength,  and  problems  suffi- 
cient to  occupy  all  his  thoughts.  He  will  not 
need  to  pass  beyond  the  bounds  of  the  city  of 
Buffalo  to  find  a  place  for  the  employment  of  every 
power  he  possesses,  and  every  hour  he  can  give  to 
the  administration  of  the  affairs  of  the  church. 

So  when  we  elected  a  Bishop  at  the  recent  coun- 
cil, we  really  and  necessarily  elected  a  Bishop  of 
Buffalo.  That  city  must  of  necessity  be  the  resi- 
dence of  the  Bishop,  and  must  occupy  the  greater 
portion  of  his  time  and  thought.     If  he  does  a  real 


A    Voice  in  the   Wildertiess.  loi 

and  great  work  there,  he  will  have  but  little  of 
himself  to  give  to  the  country  districts,  and  to  the 
outlying  towns.  It  is  for  this  reason  that  the 
division  of  the  Diocese  is  a  matter  of  such  immedi- 
ate and  paramount  importance. 

It  was  because  I  recognized  the  vast  possibilities 
of  church  work  in  the  city  of  Buffalo,  because  I 
recognized  that  that  city  demanded  and  ought  to 
have  all  that  the  wisest,  holiest  Bishop  could  give 
it,  that  I  went  to  the  convention,  carrying  my  reso- 
lutions in  my  hand. 

I  went  to  plead  for  another  city,  a  city  in  which 
I  have  lived  and  worked  for  eighteen  years  ;  a  city 
which  I  love  as  a  man  loves  his  own.  I  went  to 
the  council  in  the  great  city  of  Buffalo  prepared  to 
pray  that  it  would  consider  not  only  its  own  inter- 
est, but  also  the  interests  of  the  other  important 
city  subject  to  its  jurisdiction. 

For  the  Diocese  of  Western  New  York  has  not 
only  the  third,  but  also  the  fourth  city  of  the  State 
of  New  York. 

The  city  of  Rochester,  lying  at  the  head  of  the 
Genesee  Valley,  is  the  largest  inland  city  in  the 
world.  It  is  a  city  of  nearly  two  hundred  thousand 
people,  and  it  is  increasing  in  population  every  day. 
Being,  as  it  is,  the  county  seat  of  the  second  richest 
county  in  the  United  States, — having  as  its  tribu- 
tary country  the  garden  spot  of  the  world,  it  is 
now,  and  always  will  be,  a  most  attractive  place  of 
residence.  It  is  known  the  world  over  for  its  fruits 
and  its  flowers,  and  it  has  already  a  leading  place 


102  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

in  some  of  the  most  important  industrial  pursuits. 
It  sends  its  shoes  to  London  and  Melbourne,  and 
its  manufactured  clothing  to  every  state  in  the 
Union. 

This  city  of  two  hundred  thousand  people  has 
its  university,  its  theological  seminaries,  Protestant 
and  Catholic,  its  schools,  public  and  private,  its 
hospitals  and  homes,  its  hundred  and  more 
churches  of  every  denomination,  and  surpasses 
any  city  of  its  size  in  the  country,  in  the  extent 
and  beneficence  of  its  charitable  work. 

Now,  on  the  face  of  it,  it  would  seem  the  sheer- 
est folly  to  treat  this  city,  an  independent  center 
of  life,  wealth,  culture  and  religion,  as  if  it  were  a 
mere  outlying  town  of  the  city  of  Buffalo.  It 
would  seem  to  any  reasonable  person  that  the 
church  should  be  organized  in  this  city  to  the 
utmost  limit  of  its  power  of  organization.  That 
there  should  be  here  a  resident  Bishop,  making 
this  city  his  home,  and  giving  it  the  chief  place  in 
his  thought  and  his  prayer.  It  seems  to  me  and 
to  others  to  be  the  very  spirit  of  unwisdom  to  ask 
a  man  to  rule  the  church,  in  its  present  formative 
state,  in  both  of  these  large  cities.  Neither  of 
them  can  receive  from  him  that  close  attention 
which  its  needs  demand. 

The  Protestant  Episcopal  church  is  the  only 
ecclesiastical  body  that  is  not  organized  to  the  full 
limit  of  its  organizing  power  in  Rochester.  The 
Roman  church  has  its  Bishop  here,  whose  resi- 
dence has  made  that  church  a  power  in  this  com- 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  loj 

munity.  No  man  has  ever  accomplislied  more  in 
any  place  than  has  Bishop  McQuaid  in  the  city  of 
Rochester,  in  the  twenty-five  years  of  his  episco- 
pate. 

The  Methodist  Society  makes  this  city  the  cen- 
ter of  one  of  its  conferences.  The  Presbyterian 
body  makes  it  the  home  of  a  fully  organized  pres- 
bytery. Only  that  church  which  calls  itself  the 
American  Church,  the  church  that  has  in  its  keep- 
ing the  devotional  and  spiritual  treasures  of  the 
English-speaking  peoples,  neglects  this  important 
and  growing  city  ;  gives  it  the  church  organization 
not  of  a  cit}^,  but  of  a  village,  and  condemns  it  to  a 
barren  Congregationalism,  which  its  priests  have 
vainly  endeavored  to  mitigate  by  a  ghastly  attempt 
at  Presbyterianism. 

I  claim  that  the  Episcopal  church,  in  pursuing 
this  course  of  action,  has  violated  the  fundamental 
principles  of  its  own  constitution,  and  is  reaping 
the  consequences  of  that  violation  in  disorganiza- 
tion and  disaster. 

That  the  church  in  this  city  is  disorganized,  I 
assert  upon  no  less  an  authority  than  that  of  the 
late  Bishop  of  the  Diocese.  When  he  wrote  to  me 
on  my  acceptance  of  the  Rectorship  of  St.  Andrew's 
church,  he  said  to  me  :  "  You  will  find  the  church 
in  that  city  sadly  disorganized."  The  Bishop  was 
kind  enough  to  add  that  he  hoped  my  coming 
might  lead  to  a  better  state  of  affairs. 

On  coming  to  this  city  I  found  the  Bishop's 
words  sadly  true  ;  and  he,  alas,  because  of  my  sins 


10^  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

and  infirmities,  found  his  hopes  as  sadly  disap- 
pointed. I  have,  indeed,  by  the  grace  of  God,  suc- 
ceeded in  organizing  the  life  of  the  church  to  a  cer- 
tain degree  in  my  own  parish  and  around  about 
my  own  house,  but  I  fear  that  in  the  church  at 
large  in  the  city  I  have  been  only  another  element 
of  disorganization. 

But  in  this  I  claim  I  am  not  wholly  to  blame.  I, 
a  priest  of  the  church,  was  never  in  the  Divine 
economy  intended  to  be  the  center  and  source  of 
unity  to  the  church.  And  any  attempt  on  the 
part  of  any  priest  to  make  himself  the  center  of 
unity,  must  result  in  abject  failure.  He  is  trying 
to  usurp  a  function  that  does  not  belong  to  him. 

And  this  state  of  affairs  has  necessarily  resulted 
in  disaster.  Within  the  last  five  years,  at  least 
twenty  thousand  dollars  of  church  property  has 
been  swept  out  of  existence.  One  parish,  the 
foundations  of  which  were  laid  wisely,  by  pious 
and  devoted  men  and  women,  has,  by  mismanage- 
ment, become  extinct,  its  propert}^  sold  under  the 
hammer,  and  the  memorials  sacred  to  the  dead, 
and  altar  vessels  consecrated  to  God,  sacrificed  to 
pay  the  debts  of  the  corporation.  In  another  case 
the  black  flag  of  revolt  floated  over  a  church  build- 
ing to  the  great  grief  and  shame  of  every  church- 
man, and  the  work,  which  had  existed  for  twenty- 
five  years,  has  been  given  up  and  the  building- 
sold,  which  building  is  now  occupied  by  another 
body  of  Christian  workers  not  in  communion  with 
the  church. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  loj 

I  do  not  revive  the  memory  of  these  sad  disasters 
to  the  church,  which  are  matters  of  public  history, 
for  any  other  purpose  than  to  show  that  there  is 
some  wrong  in  our  system  of  church  polity  which 
demands  a  remedy.  I  have  given  a  great  deal  of 
study  and  thought  to  this  subject,  lying  as  it  does 
very  near  my  heart,  and  to  my  mind  both  the 
wrong  and  the  remedy  are  plain.  The  church  in 
this  case  has  been  violating  a  fundamental  princi- 
ple of  her  own  constitution.  This  fundamental 
principle  of  primitive  and  catholic  law,  is  that  the 
church  shall  be  organized  up  to  the  limit  of  its  organ- 
izing pozver  in  every  considerable  center  of  life. 

The  church  in  every  city  is,  by  the  constitution 
of  the  catholic  church,  an  independent  organic 
body,  having  in  itself  all  that  is  necessary  to  the 
full  life  of  the  church.  The  church  in  every  city 
has  a  right  to  its  Bishop,  its  college  of  Presbyters, 
its  staff  of  deacons,  and  its  congregation  of  faithful 
people.  If  the  church  is  lacking  in  any  of  these 
elements,  it  is  lacking  in  some  essential  principle 
of  its  life,  and  must  suffer  in  consequence. 

This  perfect  local  organization  and  comparative 
independence  of  the  church  in  every  city,  is  the 
most  important  fact  in  the  history  of  primitive 
Christianity,  and  was  one  of  the  chief  of  the  sec- 
ondary reasons  for  the  triumph  of  our  holy  reli- 
gion.--== 

And  this  primitive  order  is  the  one  thing  that 
the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  has  in  its  keep- 

*  Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,  Chapter  xv. 


io6  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

ing  to  maintain  and  perpetuate.  Tlie  only  reason 
for  our  existence  is  that  we  maintain  the  primitive 
polity  of  the  church  as  it  was  before  the  great 
Roman  domination. 

Now  we  cannot  do  violence  to  the  constitution 
of  our  own  body  without  suffering.  There  is  no 
more  reason  why  the  church  in  Rochester  should 
be  subject  to  the  church  in  Buffalo,  than  there  is 
that  the  church  in  New  York  should  be  subject  to 
the  church  in  Rome. 

The  evils  that  have  afflicted  us  are  the  evils  that 
come  from  our  neglect  of  the  laws  of  our  own  life. 
That  law  is  a  Bishop  for  every  city,  and  a  city  for 
every  Bishop.  In  order  to  prove  this,  I  shall  have 
to  briefly  traverse  the  origin,  history  and  nature  of 
the  Episcopal  oihce,  and  show  its  relation  to  the 
general  life  of  the  church. 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE   ORIGIN  OF   THE)   EPISCOPAL   OFFICE. 

The  office  of  a  Bishop  in  tlie  church  of  God 
derives  its  paramount  importance  from  the  fact 
that  it  had  its  origin  in  no  less  an  event  than  the 
coming  into  this  world  of  the  Eternal  Son  of  God. 
The  episcopal  office  had  its  beginning  in  the  person 
of  Jesus  Christ.  He  was  the  first  "Shepherd  and 
Bishop  of  our  souls.'"*'  From  him  all  other  Bish- 
ops succeed,  and  derive  from  Him  all  the  powers 
and  privileges  of  their  office.  In  the  person  and 
life  of  Jesus  Christ  we  have  the  norm  of  the  Epis- 
copal life  in  the  church.  The  heart  of  the  Great 
God  and  Father  of  men  was  moved  with  compassion 
because  His  people  were  scattered  abroad  as  sheep 
having  no  shepherd.  The  shepherds  whom  He 
had  appointed  over  the  sheep  were  not  true  shep- 
herds. The  kings,  the  priests,  the  scribes,  the 
natural  leaders  and  overseers  of  the  people,  fed 
themselves :  they  did  not  feed  the  flock.  God's 
anger  was  upon  His  shepherds ;  His  pity  was  for 
the  flock.  And  He  sent  his  own  Son,  born  of 
Mary,  that  He  might  shepherd  His  people  Israel. 
He  sent  Him  to  look  after  the  sheep,  saying: 
"  Behold  I,  even  I,  will  both  search  My  sheep  and 
seek  them  out.  As  a  shepherd  seeketh  out  his 
flock  in  the  day  that  he  is  among  his  sheep  that 
are  scattered,  so  will  I  seek  out  My  sheep,  and  will 

*  S.  Peter  i,  ii,  25. 


io8  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

deliver  them  out  of  all  places  where  they  have  been 
scattered  in  the  cloudy  and  dark  day.'"^ 

Jesus  came  to  see  His  people  and  give  to  each  of 
them  according  to  his  need.  He  came  to  see  John 
the  son  of  Zebedee  in  his  purity,  and  to  give  to 
him  the  power  of  His  inspiring  love ;  He  came  to 
see  the  woman  that  was  a  sinner,  and  to  give  to 
her  the  comfort  of  His  cleansing  word ;  He  came 
to  see  blind  Bartimeus  by  the  wayside  of  Jericho, 
and  to  give  to  him  the  glory  of  sight.  Our  Lord 
went  through  the  towns  of  Galilee,  first  to  see,  and 
then  to  do.  And  at  last  He  saw  that  what  the 
people  needed  most  of  all  was  that  He  should  give 
Himself.  And  He  went  down  to  Jerusalem  and 
offered  Himself  with  prayers  and  groanings  that 
cannot  be  uttered ;  when  on  the  cross  He  had 
called  for  the  last  time  to  His  wandering  people ; 
when  from  the  cross  He  had  stretched  out  His 
holy  hands  in  blessing ;  when  He  bowed  His  head 
and  gave  up  the  ghost,  then  the  Bpiscopal  of&ce,  a 
new  creation  of  God,  was  perfected,  and  entered 
upon  its  long  history  of  salvation  and  of  blessing. 
When  the  Lord  God  brought  again  from  the  dead 
the  Great  Shepherd  of  the  sheep,  then  that  Shep- 
herd gave  to  men  whom  He  had  chosen  the  Shep- 
herd's staif,  bidding  them  to  feed  His  lambs  and  to 
tend  His  sheep.f  When  our  Lord  breathed  upon 
his  apostles  and  said  unto  them  :  "  Receive  ye  the 
Holy  Ghost,"J  He  gave  to  them,  in  all  the  pleni- 

*  Ezekiel  xxxiv,  ii,  12. 

t  S.  John  xxi,  15,  etc.,  Revised  version.  %  S.  John  xx,  22. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  log 

tude  of  its  power  and  grace,  tlie  office  whicli  He  by 
His  life  and  death  had  created.  The  apostles  were 
the  immediate  and  direct  successors  of  Jesus  Christ. 

The  duty  of  their  office  was  to  go  into  all  the 
w^orld  to  seek  out  the  people  of  God,  to  bring  them 
into  the  fold  of  His  church,  and  to  feed  them  with 
the  bread  of  life. 

For  a  long  time  the  apostles  hesitated  to  go  out 
upon  their  great  mission.  They  seemed  to  fear 
that  awful  heathen  world  which  they  were  sent  to 
convert.  They  kept  close  together,  going  no  far- 
ther from  Jerusalem  than  Samaria  and  Antioch. 

But  this  time  of  hesitation  was  not  wasted  time. 
The  church  in  Jerusalem  was  organized.  James 
the  Just  was  made  its  chief  pastor,  and  that  church 
became  the  pattern  of  all  churches.  And  beside 
this,  a  common  Christian  tradition  became  the  pos- 
session of  all  of  the  apostles,  and  that  form  of  sound 
words  which  has  kept  forever,  "  the  truth  as  it  is 
in  Jesus,"*  was  put  into  shape  by  their  combined 
\visdom  and  authority  to  be  the  eternal  heritage  of 
the  church.  But  the  Lord  Jesus,  apparently  im- 
patient of  delay,  came  down  once  more  out  of 
heaven,  and  by  violence  seized  upon  Saul  of 
Tarsus,  and  made  of  the  persecutor  an  apostle, 
compelling  him  as  a  chosen  vessel  of  His  grace  to 
bear  His  name  far  hence  to  the  Gentiles. 

With  the  conversion  of  S.  Paul  a  new  era  begins 
for  the  Gospel  of  Jesus.  The  apostles  leave  Jeru- 
salem and  go  each  in  his  own  way  upon  his  own 

*  Ephesians,  iv,  21. 


no  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

mission.  And,  as  they  feared,  the  heathen  world 
swallowed  them  up.  They  were  lost  in  it.  Of  the 
new  apostle  Paul  we  hear  much  for  a  little  while, 
but  of  the  rest  nothing.  Faint  rumors  came  to  us 
of  their  life  and  their  death,  but  of  their  history  and 
of  their  fate  we  know  nothing  certain.  Like  some 
rash  Arctic  explorer,  they  are  lost  forever  to  the 
knowledge  of  mankind  in  the  darkness  and  cold- 
ness of  an  unblieving  world. 

And  S.  Paul  also  soon  disappeared  from  history. 
To  my  thinking  there  are  no  more  dramatic  words 
in  human  writing  than  these  :  "  And  he  abode  two 
whole  years  in  his  own  hired  house,  and  received 
all  that  went  in  unto  him,  preaching  the  kingdom 
of  God,  and  teaching  the  things  concerning  the 
Lord  Jesus  Christ  with  all  boldness ;  no  man  for- 
bidding him."* 

These  few  simple  words  close  the  apostles'  his- 
tory, and  from  henceforth  these  men  go  about  their 
work  in  all  the  silence  and  secrecy  of  nature,  and 
their  lives  "  are  hid  with  Christ  in  God."f 

*  Book  of  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  xx\aii,  30,  31. 
t^Colossians  iii,  3. 


CHAPTER   III. 

THE    HISTORY   OF   THE    EPISCOPATE. 

For  nearly  a  century  nothing  is  heard  of  the 
apostles.  "  We  wot  not  what  is  become  of  them.'"^ 
Secular  history  has  never  known  of  them,  and 
sacred  history  is  silent  concerning  them,  and  as  we 
search  for  them  in  that  age  we  cry.  Where  are  the 
Apostles  ? 

But  in  the  course  of  time  the  darkness  slowl}'- 
lifts,  and  in  the  gray  light  of  the  new  morning  we 
see  a  sight  which  leads  us  to  exclaim,  "  Where  are 
not  the  apostles  ?  "  for  we  see  them  everjr^vhere. 

In  every  city  and  town  of  the  Roman  Empire  is 
a  new,  a  strange  and  wonderful  society,  that  owes 
its  existence  to  the  presence  and  work  of  the  Apos- 
tles of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ. 

This  society  had  in  its  keeping  the  secret  of  a 
new  life  for  man.  Its  members  no  longer  consider 
themselves  as  citizens  of  the  kingdom  of  this 
world ;  they  are  citizens  of  the  Kingdom  of  God. 
When  a  member  of  this  society  was  asked  to  give 
an  account  of  himself,  he  answered,  "  I  am  a  Chris- 
tian." "  For  this  he  confessed,  instead  of  his 
name,  his  city,  his  race,  and  instead  of  every- 
thing, "f 

There  is  not  in  the  history  of  the  world  anj'^ 
movement  that  can  be  compared  with  that  move- 

*  Exodus  xxxii,  i. 

t  Eusebius.     Bohn  :  Geo  Bell  &  Sons,  1879.     Page  160. 


112  A    Voice  in  the  Wilderness. 

ment,  whicli,  originating  in  Upper  Galilee  in  the 
person  of  Jesus  Christ,  and  by  Him  committed  to 
the  hands  of  the  twelve  men  whom  He  had  chosen, 
resulted  in  the  creation  of  that  new  order  of  exist- 
ence known  as  the  Church. 

Living,  as  we  do,  in  the  Church,  familiar  with 
the  thoughts  and  ways  of  the  Church,  we  fail  to 
appreciate  the  wonder  of  its  creation.  It  came 
without  observation.  In  the  first  century  it  had 
no  existence ;  in  the  fourth  century  it  ruled  the 
world.  It  was  a  great  moral  revolution  that  car- 
ried humanity  from  one  base  of  existence  to  an- 
other. Before  Christ,  the  human  order  rested 
upon  physical  force  ;  after  Christ,  it  has  rested  upon 
moral  force.  Before  Christ,  it  was  strength  of 
arm  ;  after  Christ,  it  is  strength  of  heart. 

This  new  life  was  in  the  keeping  of  this  new 
society.  The  Christian  Church  was  and  is  organ- 
ized moral  and  spiritual  force.  As  we  study  the 
inner  life  of  these  societies,  they  reveal  to  us  their 
wonderful  and  confessedly  striking  method  of  life.* 
Found  in  every  part  of  the  Roman  Empire,  and 
passing  the  imperial  boundaries,  into  Persia  on  the 
east,  they  have  everywhere  a  common  origin,  a 
common  form  of  government,  a  common  doctrine 
and  a  common  life. 

f  Presiding  over  each  of  these  societies  was  an 
officer  called  eTrtWoTro?,  which  word  is  defined  by  the 

*  Epistle  to  Diognetus,  Apostolic  Fathers.  Edinburgh  :  T.  &  T, 
Clark,  1873.     Page  307. 

t  Justin  Martyr.  Edinburgh,  1873  :  T.  &  T.  Clark.  Page  301. 
Bishop  called  President  of  the  Brethren. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  iij 

Greek  dictionary  to  mean  an  overseer,  a  watcher,  a 
guardian.  This  word  has  been  corrupted  in  our 
language  into  the  shortened  form  of  Bishop. 

Now,  the  wonderful  fact  is  that  each  of  these 
Bishops,  wherever  we  find  him,  claimed  to  be  a 
successor  of  the  Apostles  of  our  Lord  and  Saviour 
Jesus  Christ.  It  was  from  them  that  he  received 
his  authority  to  tend  and  feed  the  flock  of  Christ ; 
he  derived  from  them  his  doctrine  and  his  mode  of 
life.  He  was  himself  an  Apostle,  though  called 
by  another  name. 

In  the  Episcopate  we  have  a  marvelous  example 
of  the  conservation  of  spiritual  energy.  Christ 
disappears  in  His  own  person,  and  reappears  in 
the  person  of  the  Apostles  ;  the  Apostles  disappear 
in  their  own  persons  and  reappear  in  the  person 
of  the  Bishop.  The  same  force  is  in  each  of  these, 
simply  changing  its  mode  of  operation.  Christ 
brings  salvation,  the  Apostles  publish  it,  the  Bish- 
ops keep  it. 

And  this  is  what  we  mean  by  Apostolic  succes- 
sion. It  is  that  Christ  our  Lord  brought ;  the 
Apostles  organized,  and  the  Bishops  perpetuate  the 
power  of  God  for  the  salvation  of  man.* 

The  Bishops  of  the  church  became  in  a  short 
time  a  powerful  and  influential  body  of  men. 
They  were  soon  recognized  as  the  heads  of  the 
moral  and   spiritual    order  in    the  ancient  world. 

*  Man  is  saved  by  becoming  and  continuing  a  member  of  the  moral 
and  spiritual  order  of  being.  The  spiritual  and  moral  order  is  the 
Church  of  God. 


11^  A    Voice  in  the  Wilderness. 

They  attracted  to  themselves  all  who  wished  to 
escape  from  the  brutal,  miserable  life  that  men 
were  then  living.  The  weary  and  the  heavy  laden 
came  to  them  for  rest,  the  poor  came  to  them  for 
bread,  the  oppressed  for  protection,  the  sinful  for 
pardon,  the  pure  in  heart  for  safety.  Within  three 
centuries  the  Christian  church  had  gathered  to 
itself  the  moral  worth  of  the  Roman  Bmpire,  and 
its  triumph  was  a  foregone  conclusion. 

During  the  first  and  formative  period  of  Chris- 
tian history  the  Bishops  rested  in  and  made  use  of 
moral  and  spiritual  forces  only,  for  the  defence  of 
the  church,  and  the  maintenance  and  upbuilding 
of  Christian  truth  and  life.  As  a  class  they  were 
men  of  the  common  people,  without  wealth  or 
social  position  or  political  influence.  They  did 
their  work  without  might,  violence  or  persuasion. 
The  revolution  which  they  inaugurated  and  carried 
to  a  successful  conclusion  was  stained  by  no  blood 
but  their  own. 

They  practiced  that  doctrine  of  passive  resist- 
ance which  our  Lord  laid  down  as  the  comer-stone 
of  the  new  life  of  God.  When  Roman  authority 
commanded  them  to  deny  God  and  worship  idols, 
they  neither  submitted  nor  rebelled ;  they  simply 
refused  and  died.  They  pitted  moral  force  against 
physical  force,  and  in  the  nature  of  things  moral 
force  was  the  stronger  and  prevailed. 

When  Christianity  became  the  established  relig- 
ion of  the  empire,  as  it  did  in  the  fourth  century, 
the  character  of  that  religion  suffered   from   the 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  ii§ 

change.  It  became  worldly  and  popular.  Its  own 
great  distinctive  doctrines  were  taught,  but  no 
longer  practiced,  by  the  great  mass  of  professing 
Christians. 

And  this  change  was  manifested  in  the  life  and 
character  of  the  Bishops.  They  became  at  once 
men  of  great  social  and  political  importance ;  they 
acquired  earthly  dignity  and  earthly  power  and 
wealth.  They  became  the  equals  and  companions 
of  emperors  and  kings,  and  the  seat  of  the  bishop 
was  placed  beside  the  throne  of  the  prince. 

In  the  Bastem  or  Greek  church  this  acquisition 
of  Avorldly  power  and  greatness  was  followed  very 
quickly  by  an  almost  total  loss  of  spiritual  and 
moral  force. 

That  great  order  of  men  who  in  the  second, 
third  and  fourth  centuries  withstood  the  whole 
power  of  the  Roman  empire,  compelling  that  em- 
pire at  last  to  accept  them  as  its  spiritual  pastors 
and  masters,  at  the  end  of  the  fifth  century  had 
fallen  so  fast  and  so  far  as  to  become  the  syco- 
phants of  that  pedant  Justinian,  and  the  playthings 
of  that  harlot  Theodora,'-'  and  that  pusillanimity 
has  marked  the  life  of  the  Eastern  episcopate  down 
to  the  present  day,  when  it  finds  itself  the  slave  of 
the  Sultan  and  the  Tzar. 

In  the  Western  or  Latin  church  the  history  of 
the  Episcopal  order  was  widely  different  from  the 
history  of  the  same  order  in  the  Eastern  church. 
In  the  break  up  of  the    Roman    empire,    in    the 

*  See  Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire. 


ii6  A    Voice  in  the  Wilderness. 

absence  of  tlie  Emperor,  it  found  itself  not  in  sub- 
jection to,  but  in  control  of,  tbe  forcesW  tbe  pbysi- 
cal  and  temporal  world.  And  tbe  temptation  of 
the  Bpiscopal  order  in  tbe  west  was  to  seize  upon 
these  forces  and  use  them  for  its  own  aggrandize- 
ment. It  saw  the  kingdoms  of  the  w^orld  and  the 
glory  of  them,  and  strove  to  make  that  kingdom 
and  glory  its  own.  The  great  sin  of  the  Western 
Episcopate  has  been  pride  and  arrogance.  It  has 
striven  for  worldly  power  and  wealth ;  has  built 
for  itself  palaces  and  acquired  large  revenues.* 

The  Bishops  aspired  to  be  not  only  the  equals 
but  the  superiors  of  earthly  kings  and  princes. 
The  claim  of  the  Bishop  of  Rome  to  absolute  tem- 
poral and  spiritual  dominion,  is  the  central  and 
controlling  fact  of  Western  church  history,  and  to 
that  claim  and  its  failure  we  owe  the  present  feeble- 
ness and  confusion  of  Western  Christendom. 

But  that  fact,  while  central  and  controlling,  is 
not  an  isolated  fact.  The  whole  western  Episco- 
pate has  shared  in  this  sin  of  arrogance  and  ambi- 
tion, and  we  associate  that  office  in  our  minds  with 
titles  of  honor,  with  wealth,  dignity  and  social 
importance. 

But  it  must  be  evident  to  every  observant  per- 
son that  we  are  entering  upon  a  new  era  of  devel- 
opment in  Christian  history^  The  permanent  loss 
of  temporal  power  by  the  Bishop  of  Rome  is  only 
one  of  the  many  signs  of  the  times  showing  that 
the  days  of  the  prince-bishop  are  numbered.     We 

*  See  Milman,  Latin  Christianity. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  iiy 

may  expect  in  the  not  distant  future  to  see  the 
separation  of  Church  and  State  brought  to  pass  in 
every  Christian  country,  and  the  Church  return  to 
its  primitive  condition  as  simply  a  moral  and  spir- 
itual force  in  the  community. 

Such  is  the  condition  of  the  Church  in  this 
country.  Whatever  social  prestige  may  still  cling 
to  it,  the  episcopate  in  this  country  has  no  political 
influence  or  importance.  For  the  first  time  since 
Constantine,  we  have  a  Church  and  an  Episcopate 
entirely  free  from  any  control  by  or  complication 
with  the  State.  The  only  power  which  the  Bishop 
has  or  can  exercise  is  the  power  which  belongs  to 
him  as  the  successor  of  the  Apostles  and  of  our 
Lord  and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ,  a  power  spiritual 
and  moral,  unaided  by  any  forces  other  than  those 
which  belong  to  the  Kingdom  of  God. 

It  is  well  for  us,  if  we  can,  to  separate  the  epis- 
copal office  from  any  adventitious  circumstances 
which  may  have  surrounded  it,  from  the  wealth, 
the  dignit}^,  the  social  and  political  importance 
which  it  has  attained  in  the  days  of  its  earthly 
greatness  and  earthly  decadence,  and  see  it,  if  we 
can,  in  its  first  estate,  when  it  exercised  its  great- 
est influence  and  accomplished  its  most  permanent 
work. 

When  we  see  the  Bishop  as  he  was  in  the  days 
of  his  primitive  simplicity,  before  he  became  a 
prince  and  a  prelate,  we  learn  that  he  exercised  the 
duty  of  oversight ;  exerted  the  power  of  personal 
influence,  and  was  the  center  of  unit}^  to  the  Church. 


ii8  A    Voice  m  the   Wilderness. 

These  are  tiie  tliree  great  elements  in  the  epis- 
copal character  as  it  was  in  the  days  of  its  purity, 
and  these  three  elements  will  always  be  the  ele- 
ments in  which  it  will  find  its  greatest  strength. 

And  as  it  is  this  elementary  character  of  the 
episcopate  that  really  lies  at  the  basis  of  my  argu- 
ment for  the  division  of  the  Diocese  of  Western 
New  York,  I  will  beg  your  attention  while  we  con- 
sider each  of  these  elements  separately,  and  try  to 
show  their  bearing  upon  the  question  under  con- 
sideration. 


CHAPTER   IV. 

THE   DUTY   OF   OVERSIGHT. 

The  episcopate,  as  its  name  implies,  had  for  its 
great  duty  the  oversight  of  the  Church.  ETri^/coTro?, 
Cardinal  Pelliccia  tells  us,  "  was  the  name  of  that 
commissioner  among  the  Athenians  who  used  to 
travel  every  year  through  the  subject  cities  of 
Attica,  that  at  his  leisure  he  might  hold  a  visita- 
tion and  administer  justice  in  them.  And  this 
was  the  official  name,  therefore,  which  the  Church 
transferred  to  those  who  in  the  republic  of  Chris- 
tians have  authority  over  others,  and  who  are  the 
inspectors  of  their  morals  and  of  their  manner  of 
life.  This  inspector  was  first  in  the  ecclesiastical 
hierarchy,  and  to  him  both  deacons  and  laymen 
and  presbyters  were  subject,  while  he  himself  was 
subject  to  Christ.'"-' 

This  duty  of  oversight  was  not  an  oversight  of 
institutions  and  general  work,  but  an  oversight  of 
souls.  We  are  told  in  the  Apostolic  Constitutions, 
which  give  us  a  view  of  the  Church  as  it  was  in 

*  "The  Polity  of  the  Christian  Church."  Cardinal  Pelliccia.  Eng. 
trans.:  J.  Masters  &  Co.,  London,  18S2.     Page  74. 

Note. — I  beg  to  call  the  reader's  attention  to  this  Roman  authority, 
conceding,  as  it  does,  the  independence  of  the  Episcopate  and  its 
direct  subjection  to  Christ.  But  I  beg  to  differ  from  the  learned 
Cardinal  in  his  estimate  of  the  episcopal  office.  His  mind  was  colored 
b}'  the  dignity,  wealth  and  authority  which  accrued  to  the  Episcopate 
after  the  conversion  of  Constantine.  But  the  primitive  character  of  the 
Episcopate  was  far  more  simple,  having  less  authority  and  more  direct 
influence. 


120  A    Voice  in  the  Wilderness. 

the  third  century,  that  the  Bishop  is  to  see  to  the 
general  temporal  and  spiritual  welfare  of  the  whole 
body  of  the  Church  under  his  care.  "  Do  you, 
therefore,  O  bishops,  be  solicitous  about  their 
maintenance,  being  in  nothing  wanting  to  them ; 
exhibiting  to  orphans  the  care  of  parents ;  to 
widows  the  care  of  husbands ;  to  those  of  suitable 
age,  marriage ;  to  the  artificer,  work ;  to  the  una- 
ble, commiseration  ;  to  the  strangers,  an  house  ;  to 
the  hungry,  food ;  to  the  thirsty,  drink ;  to  the 
naked,  clothing ;  to  the  sick,  visitation ;  to  the 
prisoners,  assistance.  Besides  these,  have  a  greater 
care  of  the  orphan,  that  nothing  may  be  wanting 
to  them  ;  and  that  as  to  the  maiden,  till  she  arrives 
at  the  age  of  marriage,  and  ye  give  her  in  marriage 
to  a  brother ;  to  the  young  man  assistance,  that  he 
may  learn  a  trade,"  etc."^ 

When  one  reads  this  account  of  the  daily  duty 
of  the  Bishop,  he  does  not  wonder  at  the  triumph 
of  the  Church.  Like  the  Lord,  she  made  the 
human  heart  the  seat  of  her  empire,  and  she  won 
that  heart  by  hourly  acts  of  mercy  and  kindness. 
She  won  the  gratitude,  the  love  and  the  veneration 
of  those  who  in  these  days  are  called  "  the  masses," 
and  who  are  so  great  a  perplexity  to  this  same 
Church  to-day.  She  won  them  by  not  looking 
upon  them  as  masses,  but  as  individual  men  and 
women,  each  having  some  special  need,  each  know- 
ing the  bitterness  of  his  and  her  own  heart,  to  each 

*  Apostolic  Constitutions,   Book  IV  :   T.  &  T.   Clark,  Edinburgh. 
Paofe  1 08. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  121 

of  these  the  Church  came  with  its  special  ministra- 
tion ;  and  the  center  of  this  system  of  ministration 
was  the  Bishop.  He  was  to  see  and  know  the 
condition  of  every  member  of  the  flock  of  which 
God  had  made  him  the  overseer. 

When  one  reads  this  account  of  an  episcopal  life 
as  it  was  in  the  days  of  its  purity,  with  its  vast 
variety  of  action  and  its  intense  human  interest,  a 
life  which  touched  humanity  at  every  point,  one 
does  not  wonder  that  the  men  who  held  and  exer- 
cised this  of&ce  were  called  angels.'" 

And  when  one  thinks  of  the  modern  Bishop, 
condemned  as  he  too  often  is  to  a  barren  ecclesi- 
astical routine,  to  a  wearisome  round  of  social 
functions,  and  to  a  vexatious  of&cial  administra- 
tion, there  rises  in  the  heart  a  feeling  of  pity  for 
him. 

A  prelate  of  the  church,  holding  high  official 
position,  was  sitting  in  the  midst  of  the  luxury 
which  his  office  forced  upon  him,  and  he  turned 
wearily  and  said  to  the  present  writer,  "  This  is  a 
cold  and  melancholy  grandeur."  So  cold  and  mel- 
ancholy must  be  the  grandeur  of  any  Bishop, 
wherever  he  may  live,  who  b}'-  the  extent  of  his 
jurisdiction,  by  the  dignity  of  his  office,  the  wealth 
of  his  surroundings,  is  separated  from  the  great 
common  life  of  men,  who  cannot  see,  feel,  and  in  a 
measure  provide  for  those  wants  and  wishes  which 
go  to  make  up  the  sorrows  and  joys  of  human 
existence. 

*  Revelations  of  S.  John,  Chapters  ii-iii. 


122  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

And  on  the  other  hand,  when  one  thinks  of  the 
modem  mnltitude,  scattered  abroad  as  sheep  hav- 
ing no  shepherd,  hidden  in  by  streets  and  lanes 
and  cross-country  roads,  blindly  beating  against 
the  hard  fate  that  makes  them  poor  and  obscure, 
and  often  wretched  and  miserable,  seeking  every- 
where, except  in  the  Christian  church,  for  hope  and 
help,  one  is  almost  ready  to  envy  for  them  the  state 
of  the  Roman  slave  and  the  Syrian  peasant,  for 
these  had  the  inspiring  hope  of  Christian  truth  and 
the  careful  oversight  of  a  Christian  Bishop. 

If  we  are  ever  to  win  back  the  people  again  as  a 
whole  to  the  worship  and  service  of  Christ,  we  must 
go  out  and  look  for  them,  as  Christ  our  Lord  went 
out,  and  his  blessed  apostles  and  his  holy  Bishops. 
And  in  this  work  we  look  to  our  Bishops  to  take 
the  lead. 

We  should  always  remember  that  the  jurisdiction 
of  a  Bishop  by  divine  appointment  is  not  over  ter- 
ritory nor  over  institutions,  nor  over  parishes,  but 
over  souls.  And  hence,  a  Bishop's  jurisdiction 
should  never  be  so  great  as  to  forbid  his  having 
any  but  a  most  superficial  and  general  knowledge 
of  his  people.  In  a  city  like  Rochester  even,  a 
Bishop  will  have  all  he  can  do  to  see  or  know  his 
people.  And  without  sight  there  can  be  no  knowl- 
edge, and  without  knowledge  no  wise  or  righteous 
action. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE   POWER   OF   PERSONAI,   INFLUENCE. 

The  only  power  which  the  primitive  Bishop  had 
in  the  early  church  was  the  power  of  personal 
influence.  He  ruled  the  church,  not  by  reason  of 
what  he  had,  or  what  he  did,  but  by  reason  of  what 
he  was.  He  came  in  contact  with  men  one  by  one, 
and  so  gained  their  hearts  and  guided  their  actions. 

This  power  of  personal  influence  is  the  strongest 
power  in  the  world.  So  strong  is  it  that  God  based 
His  kingdom  upon  it.  Our  Lord  spent  the  greater 
part  of  His  active  ministerial  life  simply  in  gaining 
an  influence  over  the  hearts  and  minds  of  His 
apostles.  He  kept  them  with  Him  day  and  night, 
talked  with  them,  walked  with  them,  eat  with  them, 
and  so  made  his  way  into  their  hearts  that  He 
never  came  out  again.* 

The  nature  of  the  Bishop's  authority  was  most 
beautifully  expressed  by  the  name  of  his  jurisdic- 
tion. It  is  called  in  the  Apostolic  Constitutions 
his  na/3oiVta,f  that  is  "  round  about  his  housed 
His  jurisdiction  lay  as  far  as  his  personal  power 
and  influence  could  reach,  and  no  farther.  The 
Bishop's  house  was  the  center  from  which  radiated 
the  forces  that  ruled  the  church. 

*  See  Pastor  Pastorum,  Henry  Latham.  Jas.  Pott  &  Co.,  New  York, 
1891. 

t  From  which  our  word  Parish  and  the  Parish  priest  has  succeeded 
to  some  of  the  most  blessed  powers  of  the  ancient  bishop. 


12/}.  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

Some  plain  dwelling,  unmarked  and  unnoted, 
was  known  by  the  faithful  to  be  the  abiding-place 
of  Christian  truth  and  Christian  charity,  and  the 
threshold  of  that  house  was  worn  smooth  by  the 
feet  of  those  who  came  to  give  and  to  receive ;  to 
that  house  the  wealthy  Christian  came  to  leave  his 
offering,  and  there  the  poor  went  to  receive  of  the 
treasures  of  the  church. 

It  was  an  ancient  maxim  that  the  Bishop  should 
be  given  to  hospitality.  His  house  was  every 
man's.  This  conception  of  a  Bishop,  of  the  trans- 
forming power  of  his  personal  influence,  is  set  be- 
fore us  in  that  wonderful  picture  of  a  true  Bishop 
in  the  person  of  M.  Myriel,  with  which  Victor 
Hugo  opens  his  wonderful  story  "  Les  Miserables," 
and  especially  in  that  scene  where  the  convict,  Jean 
Val  Jean,  with  his  ticket-of-leave,  driven  from  the 
great  inn  down  the  street,  and  from  the  little 
inn  up  the  street,  wandering  cold  and  despair- 
ing from  the  fields  back  into  the  dark,  forbidding 
town,  meets  a  woman  who,  pointing  to  a  low  stone 
house  says,  "  knock  there ;"  he  knocks,  the  door 
opens,  and  he  finds  not  only  a  welcome,  but  he 
finds  also  his  God  and  his  own  soul. 

So  in  every  city  and  town  in  the  old  Roman 
empire  there  was  a  house  at  which  distress  could 
knock  and  find  a  welcome.  And  the  rich  and  the 
poor  came  at  last  to  bow  down  before  this  incarna- 
tion of  human  pity  and  human  purity. 

But  when  the  Bishops  become  princes,  when  they 
began  to  rule  over  a  wide  extent  of  territory,  they 


.  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  12^ 

lost  in  a  measure  ttis  power  of  personal  influence. 
Their  authority  became  magisterial,  their  adminis- 
tration bureaucratic.  An  hundred  lesser  officials, 
as  vicars  and  archdeacons,  came  between  them  and 
their  people,  and  the  charm  and  the  simplicity  of 
their  rule  was  in  a  measure  lost. 

It  is  the  trend  of  modem  church  life  to  give  the 
Bishop  his  old  place  in  the  world,  to  take  from  him 
his  grandeur,  and  give  to  him  his  simplicity  and  his 
personal  power  and  influence.  And  surely  this  is 
a  change  which  all  should  welcome,  and  most  of 
all  the  Bishops  themselves.  It  is  better  to  be  near 
to  the  people,  to  feel  them  throng  and  press,  if  so 
we  can  heal  one  woman  of  an  issue  of  blood.  It 
was  from  the  person  of  Christ  that  the  influence  of 
healing  went  forth.  And  if  we  seek  for  a  Bishop 
for  our  city,  it  is  because  we  need  just  that  power 
of  personal  influence  to  restore  the  health  of  the 
church.  We  want  to  know  our  Bishop,  and  to 
know  him  intimately,  so  that  we  can  love  him,  and 
because  we  love  him  follow  him  with  a  glad  obe- 
dience. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

THK   CENTER   OP   UNITY. 

It  is  a  fact  universally  admitted  tliat  in  the  earl  y 
daj^s  of  our  holy  religion  the  Bishop  was  the  source 
and  center  of  unity  to  the  people  of  God.  This 
principle  was  laid  down  by  ancient  writers  as 
essential  to  the  very  being  of  the  Church.  S. 
Ignatius,  in  his  letters,*  cries  over  and  over  again, 
"  Do  nothing  without  the  Bishop."  The  people 
were  to  look  to  him  in  all  matters  that  concerned 
the  welfare  of  the  Kingdom  of  God. 

He  was  to  them  in  this  regard  instead  of  Christ. 
As  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  was  head  over  all  to  the 
Church,  as  all  things  were  built  up  in  Him,  as  into 
the  head,  so  it  was  with  each  particular  Bishop ; 
he  was  the  center  toward  which  all  church  life  con- 
verged, and  from  which  it  radiated. 

But  this  function  of  his  did  not  give  him  abso- 
lute and  autocratic  authority  over  the  individual 
members  of  the  Church.  Nor  did  it  give  him  the 
right  to  control,  by  the  exercise  of  his  own  inde- 
pendent and  individual  will,  the  action  of  the 
Church  as  a  body.  His  power  to  unify  was  the 
simple  outcome  of  his  character  as  a  man,  and  of 
the  place  which  he  held  in  the  economy  of  the 
Church.  He  was  the  center  of  unity  to  the 
Church,  just  as  the  sun  is  the  center  of  unity  to 
the  solar  system.     He  attracted  men  to  himself  by 

*S.  Ignatius,  Apostolic  Fathers:  T.  &  T.  Clark,  Edinburgh,   1873. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  12^ 

the  power  of  love  that  was  in  him.  In  this  way, 
and  in  this  way  only,  was  our  Lord  the  center  of 
union  to  His  Apostles.  They  gathered  round 
Him  because  they  found  in  Him  a  purity  that  won 
their  souls  and  a  love  that  subdued  their  hearts. 
Our  Lord  never  exercised  any  external  authority 
over  His  followers.  He  left  them  free  to  go  or 
come  as  they  chose.  It  was  His  to  call  and 
theirs  to  follow.  But  when  once  they  had  come 
under  the  spell  of  His  power  they  could  not  free 
themselves  from  it.  Their  own  hearts  kept  them 
faithful  to  their  Lord.  He  was  not  some  distant 
king  whose  command  they  obeyed,  because  they 
were  subject  to  his  law,  but  He  was  their  dear  Lord 
and  Master,  around  whom  they  gathered  because 
they  loved  Him  and  could  not  live  without  Him. 

Now  the  Bishop  had  the  same  power  as  that 
exercised  by  our  blessed  Lord  and  Saviour.  He 
was  the  representative  on  earth  of  that  Man  who 
had  drawn  men  to  Him  with  the  cords  of  love. 

The  nature  of  authority  in  the  church  is  alto- 
gether different  from  the  nature  of  authority  as  it 
is  found  in  the  world.  Authority  in  the  world  is 
outward  and  formal ;  it  rests  upon  force.  A  king 
or  governor  commands  the  obedience  of  his  subjects 
under  stress  of  law  and  fear  of  punishment. 

But  in  the  Church,  authority  is  inward  and  real ; 
it  is  authority  over  the  wishes  and  impulses  of  the 
heart.  A  Bishop  could  not  command,  he  had  to 
win  obedience ;  and  this  was  the  secret  of  his  mar- 
velous power.  The  Bishops  of  the  early  Church 
9 


128  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

exercised  a  power  greater  tlian  that  of  tlie  prince 
or  magistrate.  The  property  and  tlie  lives  of  tlie 
people  were  at  their  service.  The  reason  of  this 
was  that  the  people  loved  the  Bishop,  and  loved 
the  cause  which  he  represented,  and  were  glad  to 
make  for  it  any  sacrifice,  even  the  sacrifice  of  prop- 
erty and  of  life. 

It  is  the  forgetfulness  of  the  nature  of  spiritual 
authority  which  has  been  the  fruitful  cause  of  all 
the  disorders  in  the  Church.  When,  in  the  course 
of  time.  Bishops  began  to  lord  it  over  God's  heri- 
tage ;  when  they  began  to  arrogate  to  themselves  the 
power  of  the  prince  and  the  magistrate,  and  to  issue 
their  decrees  and  their  commands,  then  the  people 
rebelled  against  them,  and  the  Church  fell  into 
confusion. 

The  Bishops,  instead  of  being  the  principle  of 
union  in  the  Church,  became  the  cause  of  discord 
and  disunion. 

It  has  been  said  that  the  great  sin  of  the  Church 
has  been  that  the  Bishops  have  desired  power 
rather  than  light.''' 

It  is  a  comparatively  easy  thing  to  rule  by 
force ;  it  requires  great  patience  to  rule  by  love. 
It  follows  that  if  a  Bishop  is  to  rule  the  Church 
over  which  he  is  placed,  his  jurisdiction  must  not 
be  so  large  as  to  make  his  administration  an  out- 
ward and  formal  one.  He  must  be  in  intimate 
association  with  all  his  people  all  the  time. 

In  the  ancient  Church  he  was  the  president  of 

*  Ruskin,  Sesame  and  Lilies. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  i2g 

the  college  of  presbyters.  He  met  with  them 
every  week  ;  they  worshipped  together  and  worked 
together,  and  this  was  the  reason  of  his  power  over 
them.  It  was  the  power  of  habit  and  association. 
This  continual  association  resulted  in  perfect  union 
of  life  and  action,  and  in  that  union  was  the  life 
and  strength  of  the  Church. 

And  in  the  Karly  Church,  as  in  the  Catholic 
Church,  always  and  everywhere,  the  jurisdiction  of 
the  Bishop  was  the  unit  of  organization.  It  was 
his  parish,  his  diocese,  his  church.  In  the  diocese, 
however  large,  there  was  really  only  one  congre- 
gation, one  great  body  of  people  moving  and 
acting  together. 

It  is  the  violation  of  this  principle  which  is  the 
weakness  of  the  Church  in  this  country.  With  us, 
it  is  not  the  jurisdiction  of  the  Bishop,  but  the  juris- 
tion  of  the  presbyter,  which  is  the  unit  of  organiza- 
tion. In  all  the  essentials  of  its  life  the  parish  is 
now  an  independent  body.  Hxcept  for  the  matter 
of  confirmation,  there  is  no  reason  why  a  Bishop 
should  ever  visit  it  or  know  anything  about  it. 

But  this  unit  of  organization  is  too  small  to  be 
effective.  It  results  in  the  establishment  in  every 
city  and  large  town  of  competing,  and  even  rival, 
organizations,  that  struggle  for  the  building  up  of 
the  parish  rather  than  the  building  up  of  the  King- 
dom of  God.  It  is  this  fact  of  rivalry  and  compe- 
tition which  is  the  cause  of  the  alienation  of  the 
clergy  and  of  that  heart-break  that  comes  of  isola- 
tion   and    misjudgment.      This    is    the    one   evil 


ijo  A    Voice  ill  the   Wilderness. 

whicli,  more  than  any  other,  hinders  the  work  of 
the  Church  to-day,  and  until  some  remedy  is  found 
for  it,  the  Church  can  never  enter  upon  that  life 
and  work  which  belongs  to  her  as  a  church  of  the 
living  God. 

And  one  remedy  for  this  is  the  smaller  diocese, 
where  the  Bishop  can  bring  his  personal  influence 
to  bear  constantly  upon  all  the  clergy  and  all  the 
people ;  where  he  can  unify  them  in  himself  by 
his  constant  care  for  them  and  oversight  of  them. 

It  will  take  a  long  time  to  bring  about  a  change 
so  radical  as  that  which  is  demanded  by  the  change 
from  the  parochial  to  the  episcopal  system,  and  it 
can  only  come  by  having  once  more  the  parochial 
episcopate,  the  Bishop  whose  jurisdiction  shall  be, 
indeed,  napoi/cm,  round  about  his  house. 

But  every  step  taken  in  that  direction  is  a  step 
toward  the  unity  of  Christendom,  for  which  we  all 
are  praying.  The  Church  will  never  unite  in  any 
system  of  doctrine,  nor  in  any  outward  form  of 
government ;  it  will  unite  in  work  and  worship, 
under  the  guidance  of  a  person. 

And  that  is  one  of  the  controlling  facts  in 
the  present  problem.  The  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church  has  in  its  keeping  two  chief  factors  of 
church  unity  ;  it  is  the  custodian  of  the  primitive 
Hpiscopate  and  of  catholic  worship.  From  all 
sides  the  people  are  looking  to  that  church  with 
hope  and  expectation.  In  the  Prayer  Book  we 
have  the  liturgical  treasures  of  the  English-speak- 
ing race,   and  that  book  is  becoming  every  day 


A    Voice  hi  the  Wilderness.  131 

more  and  more  the  devotional  handbook  of  the 
English  people ;  they  use  it  for  marriages  and  for 
burials ;  in  the  gladdest  and  saddest  hours  of  life 
it  speaks  to  them  out  of  its  precious  pages. 

The  best  minds  in  the  various  Christian  bodies 
are  beginning  to  see  that  if  the  lost  art  of  worship 
is  to  be  recovered,  it  can  best  and  most  easily  be 
done  by  the  use  of  that  form  of  public  devotion 
which  has  the  authority  of  ages  to  recommend  it. 

A  saintly  Presbyterian  pastor  once  said  to  the 
present  writer,  "  Sooner  or  later  we  must  have  a 
liturgy,  and  when  we  come  to  it,"  taking  a  prayer 
book  out  of  his  pocket,  "  here  it  is." 

We  must  remember  then  that  in  organizing  our 
Church  we  are  not  legislating  for  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church  only,  but  for  the  whole  of 
reformed  Christianity.  We  can,  if  we  will,  become 
the  center  of  unity  for  the  now  shattered  and  dis- 
cordant members  of  the  body  of  Christ. 

And  the  restoration  of  the  primitive  episcopate 
will  be  one  of  the  most  powerful  means  to  accom- 
plish this  blessed  result. 

If  in  every  considerable  center  of  life  we  place  a 
man  of  godly  character  :  such  a  man  as  we  have 
chosen  as  Bishop  of  Western  New  York  :  and  if 
that  man  gives  his  life  to  that  city ;  if  he  aims  to 
be  simply  and  lovingly  not  Bishop  of  the  Episco- 
pal Church  in  Rochester  or  Buffalo,  but  the  Bishop 
of  Rochester  or  Buffalo  ;  if  he  has  a  care  for  all  its 
moral  and  spiritual  interests ;  if  he  knows  its  poor 
and  its  rich ;  if  he  is  able,  in  his  own  person,  to 


IJ2  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

bring  these  two  classes  together  in  loving  service 
for  Christ ;  if,  because  of  his  guidance  and  service, 
his  word  is  a  word  of  power  in  that  community, 
then  without  argument,  without  observation,  with- 
out might,  violence  or  persuasion,  he  will  become 
what  he  claims  to  be,  the  Bishop  of  that  city,  and 
he  will  be  the  center  of  unity,  because  men  will  be 
united  in  their  love  and  reverence  for  him. 

Nor  is  this  altogether  a  dream  of  the  fancy. 
Already  the  Bishops  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church  are  acquiring  in  the  great  centers  of  life 
in  this  country  an  influence  and  a  power  far  out  of 
proportion  to  the  numbers,  influence  and  power  of 
the  particular  communion  over  which  they  preside. 

The  Bishop  of  the  Church  in  New  York  is  the 
Bishop  of  New  York.  His  sacred  of&ce,  his  devoted 
life  and  commanding  personality,  all  combine  to 
give  him  an  influence  such  as  no  other  man  exerts 
in  that  city. 

And  may  we  not  look  forward  to  the  time  when 
the  English  and  American  Episcopate  shall  again 
have  oversight  of  the  English  and  American  peo- 
ples, when  they  shall  again  be  the  recognized 
heads  and  centers  of  the  spiritual  and  moral  forces 
of  Anglo-Saxon  civilization  ?  No  other  Christian 
body  has  anything  like  our  equipment  for  this 
work  of  guidance  and  unification.  If  we  fail,  it 
will  be  because  we  cannot  see  the  signs  of  the 
times  and  do  not  know  the  day  of  our  visitation. 

And  may  we  not  look  on  further  and  see  Eng- 
lish Christianity,  at  peace  with  itself,  strong  in 
the  forces  that  it   has  gathered  in  the  thousand 


A    Voice  in  the   Wi/derness.  ijj 

years  of  its  life,  facing  that  other  great  form  of 
organized  Christianity,  which  is  in  communion 
with  the  See  of  Rome,  and  facing  it,  not  that  it 
may  make  war  upon  that  venerable  and  ancient 
body,  which  God  forbid,  no,  not  that  it  may  make 
war,  but  that  it  may  make  peace  on  equal  terms. 

I  plead,  then,  for  a  Bishop  in  Rochester,  because 
I  think  a  Bishop  would  be  a  center  of  unity  here, 
not  only  to  the  Protestant  Episcopal  church,  which 
sadly  needs  unification,  but  the  center  of  unity  also 
to  the  whole  people  of  God.  It  is  to  my  thought 
only  a  part  of  a  great  and  general  movement 
toward  the  better  organization  of  the  moral  and 
spiritual  life  of  man  in  this  world,  which  can  find 
its  perfection  only  in  that  church  which  was 
founded  upon  the  apostles  and  prophets,  Jesus 
Christ  Himself  being  the  chief  corner-stone,  and 
which  is  guided  by  the  Holy  Ghost  into  all  truth. 

It  may  seem  as  if  I  were  speaking  foolishly  in 
thus  connecting  the  thought  of  the  better  organiza- 
tion of  the  church  in  Rochester  with  the  better 
organization  of  the  church  throughout  the  world ; 
but  it  is  the  one  and  self-same  tide  that  beats  with 
its  mighty  waves  against  the  shore,  and  sends  the 
water  running  in  every  little  inlet.  A  perfect 
organization  of  the  church  in  Rochester  will  lead 
to  a  perfect  organization  everywhere. 

We  ask  then  for  a  Bishop  in  Rochester,  because 
we  need  his  constant,  careful  oversight  to  guide 
us,  his  loving,  personal  influence  to  comfort  us, 
and  his  presence  in  our  midst  to  unite  us  in  a 
common  life  and  work. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

THK   AMERICAN   EPISCOPATE. 

In  asking  for  a  division  of  tlie  Diocese  of  West- 
ern New  York,  I  am  only  asking  that  we  shall 
follow  the  lines  of  organic  development  which  the 
Church  has  pursued  from  the  time  of  its  organiza- 
tion in  this  country  down  to  the  present  day. 

The  history  of  the  American  Bpiscopate  is,  with 
some  variations,  very  like  the  history  of  the  prim- 
itive Bpiscopate.  It  begins  in  an  apostolate,  and 
gradually  changes  into  an  episcopate.  The  early 
Bishops  of  this  country,  Seabury,  Hobart,  Kemper 
and  Chase,  were  not  so  much  Bishops  as  Apos- 
tles. Their  task  was  that  of  founding  churches 
rather  than  of  supervising  congregations.  They 
had  assigned  to  them  vast  territories,  the  whole  of 
the  State  of  New  York,  the  whole  of  New  Bngland, 
the  vast  regions  of  the  Northwest. 

To  read  of  the  missionary  journey  of  the  saintly 
Kemper  is  like  reading  over  again  the  missionary 
journeys  of  S.  Paul ;  the  same  hardships,  the  same 
persecutions,  the  same  undying  faith,  the  same 
burning  zeal,  the  same  unfaltering  love.  No  one 
reads  the  story  of  Kemper,  of  Clarkson,  of  Whipple 
without  feeling  that  he  is  in  the  presence  of  a  new 
race  of  apostles  ;  men  sent  of  God  to  lay  anew  the 
foundations  of  His  Church. 

But  the  consequence  of  this  necessary  chapter  in 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  IJ5 

our  early  history  was  tliat  men  associated  the  juris- 
diction of  the  Bishop  with  the  idea  of  territory 
rather  than  with  the  idea  of  souls.  The  first 
thought  was  that  the  diocese  of  the  Bishop  must 
be  commensurate  with  the  boundaries  of  the 
State  ;  for  each  State  a  Bishop,  and  for  each  Bishop 
a  State.  This  would  give  him  great  importance 
and  dignity ;  he  would  rival  the  Governor ;  his 
visit  to  any  city  or  town  would  be  a  rare  and 
remarkable  event ;  villages  could  hardly  expect 
ever  to  see  him.  Such  undoubtedly  was  the  con- 
ception of  the  Episcopal  office  that  was  in  the 
minds  of  many  of  the  statesmen  who  were  influen- 
tial in  organizing  the  Church  in  this  land. 

It  was  an  erroneous  conception,  and  had  much 
to  do  with  hindering  the  growth  of  the  Church. 
As  Bishop  Littlejohn  once  said,  "  It  was  a  funda- 
mental error  of  the  American  Church,  to  consider 
the  jurisdiction  of  the  Bishop  as  a  jurisdiction  over 
territory  and  not  over  souls."  * 

It  is  curious  to  watch  the  gradual  change  of  this 
conception,  until  the  notion  of  the  Bishop,  as  the 
Bishop  in  his  see  or  seat,  a  Bishop  living  in  one 
place  and  influencing  the  Church  from  that  place, 
has  almost  displaced  the  idea  of  a  Bishop  over  a 
State,  having  no  center  of  work  and  life,  being  a 
visiting  rather  than  a  resident  official. 

The  first  step  in  this  new  direction  was  taken 
when  the  State  of  New  York  was  divided  into  the 
two  dioceses  of  New  York  and  Western  New  York, 

*  Quoted  from  memory.     Not  the  very  words  of  the  Bishop. 


i 


ij6  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

these  territorial  names  showing  that  the  territorial 
idea  still  ruled  the  minds  of  churchmen. 

The  first  canon  for  the  division  of  a  diocese,  or 
the  formation  of  a  new  diocese,  required  "  that  no 
such  diocese  shall  be  formed  which  shall  contain 
less  than  eight  thousand  square  miles  in  one  body, 
and  thirty  presbyters  who  had  been  for  one  year 
canonically  resident  within  the  bounds  of  such  new 
diocese."* 

Compare  this  with  the  present  law,  which  pro- 
vides that  no  "  new  diocese  shall  be  formed  which 
contains  less  than  six  parishes  and  six  presbyters^'' 
and  which  says  nothing  whatever  about  square 
miles,  providing  only  that  no  city  shall  form  more 
than  one  diocese,f  and  we  see  how  far  the  Church 
has  traveled  toward  the  notion  of  Episcopal  juris- 
diction, which  was  the  notion  which  prevailed  in 
the  primitive  and  catholic  church. 

This  change  of  idea  is  seen  in  the  new  manner 
of  naming  new  dioceses.  When  the  great  State  of 
Illinois  was  subdivided  into  three  dioceses  we  were 
spared  the  distressing  names.  North  Illinois,  Mid- 
dle Illinois,  South  Illinois.  The  see  principle  was 
adopted,  and  we  have  Chicago,  Springfield  and 
Quincy,  with  the  suffragan  Bishop  of  Cairo  as  the 
ecclesiastical  jurisdiction  of  that  province  in  the 
Church  known  as  the  Province  of  Illinois ;  and 
since  then  the  general  tendency  has  been  to  give 

*  Hoffman's  Law  of  the  Church  :  Stanford  &  Swords,  New  York, 
1850.     Page  160. 
t  Appendix,  Journal  of  Gen.  Con.,  1890.  Page  8. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  ijy 

every  diocese  its  see  city,  and  to  call  it  after  tlie 
name  of  that  city. 

And  may  we  not  liope  in  the  near  future  to  see 
the  great  State  of  New  York  organize  itself  upon 
primitive  and  catholic  lines,  and  assume  primitive 
and  catholic  names?  As  it  is  now,  one  of  our 
Bishops  has  jurisdiction  over  a  geographical  region 
(Western  New  York),  and  one  over  a  mathematical 
point  (Central  New  York).  May  we  not  hope  to 
see  this  speedily  changed  ;  to  have  a  line  of  Bishops 
reaching  from  the  lake  to  the  sea ;  to  have  the 
Church  organized  in  every  city  on  the  Central  rail- 
road ;  to  have  one  Bishop  at  Buffalo,  Rochester, 
Syracuse,  Utica,  Albany,  Poughkeepsie  and  New 
York,  with  a  Bishop  for  the  southern  tier  in 
Blmira,  and  a  Bishop  for  the  northern  region  in 
Troy  or  Ogdensburg  ? 

And  the  first  and  greatest  need  is  that  we  shall 
have  a  Bishop  in  Rochester. 

In  all  this  I  am  simply  indicating  what  are  the 
logical  lines  of  church  development. 

It  is  evident  to  every  one  that  the  problem  of 
the  Church  in  the  present  time  is  the  problem  of 
organization.  We  no  longer  need  to  spend  our 
strength  in  the  assertion  of  our  fundamental  prin- 
ciples. The  historic  episcopate  is  conceded  to  us 
by  all  fair-minded  thinkers.  Our  liturgical  wor- 
ship has  justified  itself,  and  is  gradually  becoming 
the  worship  of  all  English-speaking  people.  We 
have  asserted  catholic  truth,  and  have  established 
our  right  to  catholic  ritual.     All  these  matters  are 


Jj8  A    Voice  in  the   Wilder 7iess. 

in  a  measure,  at  least,  out  of  court.  They  are 
settled. 

The  questions  that  now  confront  us  are  practical. 
How  shall  we  make  the  claim  of  our  Church  not 
only  a  claim,  but  a  fact  ?  How  shall  we  become, 
not  only  de  jure  but  de  fado^  the  church  of  the 
American  people  ?  How  shall  we  bring  the  people 
into  the  Church  ?  How  shall  we  carry  the  Church 
to  the  people?  How  shall  we  give  the  Bishops 
oversight  of  the  people  ? 

These  are  some  of  the  questions  that  demand 
an  answer,  and  in  answering  them  we  shall  need 
all  our  strength  and  all  our  wisdom. 

That  a  great  change  has  come  over  the  mind  of 
the  Church  is  clear  to  all.  Little  or  no  interest 
can  now  be  excited  in  any  question  of  doctrine  or 
any  point  of  ritual ;  not  because  the  Church  has 
become  indifferent  to  these,  but  because  she  has 
settled  them.  She  has  asserted  her  unfaltering 
faith  in  the  catholic  creeds.  She  has  made  good 
her  claim  to  all  that  is  essential  to  catholic  worship. 

These  things  are  to  her  mind  no  longer  matters 
for  discussion.  The  Church  cannot  be  forever 
talking  about  the  same  thing.  She  always  has  an 
end  of  controversy. 

Leaving,  then,  the  principles  of  the  doctrine  of 
Christ,  she  goes  on  to  perfection.*  Her  work  in 
the  next  generation  will  not  be  the  assertion  of 
principle,  but  the  application  of  principle. 

The  new  life  of  the  Church  is  seen  in  the  Parish 

*  Hebrews  vi,  i. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  ijg 

House,  wliicli  is  making  tiie  Cliurcli  a  center  of 
charitable  activity  in  every  place  where  there  is  a 
priest  and  an  altar. 

And  it  is  this  new  phase  of  the  Church's  exist- 
ence which  will  bring  new  duties  to  the  Bpiscopate 
as  well  as  to  the  priesthood. 

A  Bishop  of  a  small  diocese  now  has  more  to  do, 
more  care  and  responsibility,  than  the  Bishop  of  the 
largest  State  had  fifty  years  ago. 

For  this  reason,  also,  I  desire  the  division  of 
Western  New  York.  It  is  in  the  line  of  progress 
which  Divine  Providence  has  marked  for  this 
Church  from  the  beginning  of  its  history,  and 
because  the  necessities  of  the  age  demand  it. 

You,  Right  Reverend  Father,  are  changing  your 
jurisdiction  from  an  Apostolate  to  an  Bpiscopate. 
Coming,  as  you  do,  from  the  wide  spaces  of  North 
Dakota  to  the  few  counties  of  Western  New  York, 
you  will,  I  am  sure,  think  of  your  new  jurisdiction 
as  a  very  little  thing  in  comparison  with  the  field 
you  have  left.  You  will  need  no  cathedral  car  in 
it ;  but  I  am  sure  you  will  find  in  a  short  time  that 
the  crowded  spaces  of  this  little  land  will  bring  you 
ten  times  the  work  of  the  empty  spaces  of  that 
greater  land.  Where  you  had  one  question  to  set- 
tle there,  you  will  have  twenty  here.  Your  cares 
will  be  in  inverse  ratio  to  the  extent  of  your  terri- 
torial jurisdiction. 

When  I  think  of  the  life  of  the  simplest  parish 
priest,  how  full  it  is  of  care,  of  difficulty,  of  tempta- 
tion, of  labor  ;  how  he  must  rise  early  in  the  mom- 


14.0  A    Voice  m  the   Wilderness. 

ing,  while  it  is  yet  dark,  and  say  Hastily  his  morn- 
ing prayer  and  celebrate  quickly  tke  Blessed  Sac- 
rament of  tke  Precious  Blood ;  kow  ke  gives  a  little 
time  to  kis  family  cares  ;  kow  ke  visits  kis  sckools 
for  a  moment,  gives  a  kasty  glance  at  kis  parisk 
works,  reads  and  writes  a  letter  or  two  of  business 
or  of  friendskip,  goes  out  and  makes  a  call  kere 
and  tkere  upon  tke  sick  and  tke  well ; ,  struggles  in 
tke  midst  of  all  tkis  kurry  for  tke  spirit  of  recollec- 
tion ;  kow  ke  falls  into  and  must  recover  kimself 
over  and  over  again  from  tke  sins  of  slotk  ;  kow  ke 
kas  kardly  time  to  glance  into  a  book,  ancient  or 
modem ;  kow  ke  must  prepare  kimself  almost  witk- 
out  breatk  for  preacking  and  instruction.  Wken  I 
tkink  of  my  own  life,  I  pity  my  own  soul.  It  kas 
so  little  care.  Tke  day  is  not  sufficient  for  its 
needs. 

Muck  more  must  we  pity  tke  soul  of  tke  Biskop 
of  tke  great  diocese ;  kaving  tke  care  of  all  tke 
ckurckes  ;  kurried  from  place  to  place ;  kaving  no 
altar  of  kis  own  wkere  ke  can  stand  still  and  pray ; 
receiving  in  every  kour  letters  tkat  demand  imme- 
diate answer ;  called  upon  to  take  part  in  a  multi- 
tude of  ecclesiastical,  educational  and  social  func- 
tions ;  confirming  and  preacking  tkree  times  a  day ; 
making  addresses  kere,  tkere,  and  ever3rwkere. 
Wkerever  ke  goes  it  is  an  occasion  ;  excitement 
tke  law  of  kis  life.  Wken  we  tkink  of  tkis  we 
skould  tkink  of  it  witk  tke  greatest  tenderness  and 
consideration  for  tke  Biskop ;  all  karsk  judgments 
skould  die  away  in  tke  tkougkt  tkat  tke  Biskop 


A    Voice  ill  the   Wilderness.  i/}.i 

cannot  do  the  things  that  he  would ;  he  has  no 
time. 

But  it  should  lead  us  to  provide,  as  far  as  we 
can,  for  the  Bishop's  leisure  ;  to  give  him  space  for 
prayer,  for  study,  and  for  thought. 

We  need  the  suiall  diocese  in  oj^der  that  we  may 
have  the  great  Bishop.  It  was  Augustine,  of  the 
little  city  of  Hippo,  that  laid  the  spell  of  his  theo- 
logical genius  upon  the  Western  Church,  and  Wil- 
son of  the  little  diocese  of  Sodor  and  Man  who 
gathered  and  bequeathed  to  us  his  treasures  of  de- 
votion. 

It  is  not  the  great  diocese  that  gives  dignit}^  to 
the  Bishop,  it  is  the  great  Bishop  that  gives  dignity 
to  the  diocese. 

One  of  the  objections  to  the  division  of  the  dio- 
cese of  Western  New  York  is  that  lessening  the 
territory  will  detract  from  the  dignity  of  the  Bpis- 
copate.  I  answer  to  this  that  the  proposed  diocese 
of  Rochester  is  a  little  larger  than  the  regions  of 
Upper  and  Lower  Galilee,  which  formed  the  Epis- 
copal jurisdiction  of  the  Lord  Jesus  during  all  the 
years  of  his  ministry ;  and  surely  what  is  good 
enough  for  the  Master  is  good  enough  for  any  ser- 
vant of  the  Master. 

The  work  of  the  Church  just  now  needs  deepen- 
ing rather  than  extending;  and  in  this  work  of 
deepening,  the  Episcopate  and  the  priesthood  will 
have  to  spend  time  and  strength  for  years  to  come. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

PASTOR   PASTORUM. 

Another  reason  that  demands  a  Bishop  for  such 
a  city  as  Rochester  is  the  pressing  need  of  the 
clergy  and  their  family  for  pastoral  care  and  over- 
sight. As  things  are  now,  the  clergyman  is  the 
only  member  of  the  church  without  a  pastor.  He 
and  his  family  can  never  look  for  a  friendly,  infor- 
mal, pastoral  call,  such  as  he  is  daily  making  to 
his  people.  There  is  no  minister  of  God  who  takes 
interest  in  him  and  his  children. 

He  cannot  for  evident  reasons  be  his  own  pastor, 
nor  is  it  well  for  him  to  be  the  only  pastor  for  his 
wife  and  children.  They  need  other  influence  than 
his,  other  care  and  thought  than  his,  to  make  the 
church  real  to  them. 

They  need  the  loving  care  of  the  Bishop.  If  he 
comes  in,  not  only  on  confirmation  day,  when  all  is 
hurry  and  confusion,  but  on  some  other  day,  when 
he  has  no  other  purpose  than  to  cheer  and  to  com- 
fort the  heart  of  the  wife  of  the  minister  and  to 
bless  his  children,  he  would  help  greatly  to  form 
their  spiritual  life. 

And  the  priest  himself,  above  all  men,  needs  this 
care  and  interest ;  all  the  time  he  is  giving  and 
never  receiving.  "  Virtue  goes  out  of  him,"*  and 
he  has  no  time  to  go  "  apart  into  a  desert  place  and 
rest  awhile,  "f     The   loving   care    of    our   blessed 

*  Mark  v,  30.  f  Mark  vi,  31. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderfiess.  i^j 

Lord  and  Saviour  for  the  twelve  is  one  of  the  most 
beautiful  things  in  all  His  beautiful  life.  He 
taught  them  the  duties  of  the  pastoral  office  by- 
being  to  them  the  most  perfect  of  pastors. 

If  we  could  read  their  hearts — yes,  if  they  could 
read  their  own  hearts — we  should  find  that  this 
loving  pastoral  care  is  the  one  thing  the  ministers 
of  the  church  are  craving,  and  for  lack  of  which 
their  souls  are  growing  dry  and  hard. 

And  the  Bishops  should  meet  the  clergy  in  con- 
ference and  retreat  and  preach  to  them  as  they 
preach  to  their  people. 

But  to  do  this  work  requires  time,  and  time  is 
the  one  thing  a  Bishop  never  has. 

If  a  Bishop  had  but  fifty  clergy  to  look  after, 
he  would  find  his  hands  and  his  heart  full  of  care, 
anxiety  and  work.  If  he  gave  each  of  them  three 
days  in  a  year  (and  surel}^  if  confidence  is  to  grow 
between  clergy  and  Bishop  they  each  need  that 
much  of  his  time),  then  half  his  year  can  be  spent 
in  the  simple  pastoral  care  of  the  pastors. 

And  that  is  what  the  Church  in  this  diocese  had 
in  mind  when  it  elected  its  Bishop.  We  chose  the 
man  we  did  choose  because  we  thought  he  would 
be  kind,  thoughtful  and  tender  of  his  clergy.  He 
had  been  in  our  families  and  we  had  learned  to  love 
him,  because  we  saw  in  him  a  heart  to  love  us. 

And  if,  when  he  comes  into  this  large  diocese, 
with  its  burden  of  care,  with  its  multitude  of  duties, 
he  has  no  time  for  this  intimate  care  for  his  clergy, 

lO 


14-4-  ^    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

both  he  and  we  will  suffer  the  pain  and  loss  of  dis- 
appointment. 

So  I  beg  of  him  and  of  the  people  to  consent  to 
that  division  of  jurisdiction  which  shall  enable  him 
to  do  this  necessary  and  blessed  work. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

ENDOWMENT. 

The  one  reason  why  the  resolntions  for  the 
division  of  the  diocese  were  not  considered  was  the 
financial  reason.  One  layman  said  to  me  :  "  This 
is  a  mere  business  matter.  If  you  can  show  me 
where  the  money  is  to  come  from  I  am  with  you  in 
this  movement." 

And  from  the  first  agitation  of  this  question 
down  to  the  present  this  has  been  the  one  lion  in 
the  way.  There  is  not  a  man,  cleric  or  lay,  with 
whom  I  have  conferred  who  has  not  conceded  the 
wisdom  of  an  immediate  division  of  the  diocese  of 
Western  New  York. 

Bvery  sensible  business  man  outside  the  church 
expected  us  to  take  such  action  at  the  last  council. 
The  late  Bishop  of  the  diocese,  in  an  address  which 
he  made  at  a  meeting  of  the  Archdeaconry  of 
Rochester,  spoke  of  this  division  as  a  thing  which 
must  come  to  pass. 

The  one  reason  why  we  halt  and  hesitate  is 
because  we  say,  "  We  cannot  afford  it."  We  find 
it  hard  work  to  support  one  Bishop ;  how  can  we 
take  care  of  two  ? 

Now,  let  us  look  at  this  matter  from  the  plain, 
practical  business  side  first. 

The  cost  of  Episcopal  administration  need  not 
be  more  than  eight  thousand  five  hundred  dollars 
per  year.     This  will  pay  the  salary  of  the  Bishop, 


1^6  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

give  him  his  house  to  live  in,  and  provide  for  the 
expenses  of  the  diocesan  council. 

Now  it  does  seem  to  the  onlooker  as  though  the 
church  in  the  cities  of  Buffalo  and  Rochester,  with 
the  outlying  towns  and  county,  could  provide  such 
a  sum  as  this  for  Episcopal  oversight. 

There  are  at  least  fifty  thousand  adults  in  the 
diocese  of  Western  New  York  who  are  either  mem- 
bers of  or  are  interested  in  the  welfare  of  the 
diocese.  These,  if  they  could  be  reached  and  inter- 
ested, would  provide  for  the  maintenance  of  the 
Episcopate  without  the  least  trouble  or  self-sacri- 
fice.-"^ 

I  may  be  asked,  then,  why  it  is  so  difficult  to  raise 
the  means  necessary  to  support  the  Episcopate  as 
it  is? 

One  reason  why  it  is  difficult  to  secure  the  means 
of  support  for  the  Episcopate  is  because  the  Epis- 
copate does  not  come  near  enough  to  the  people  to 
touch  their  hearts  and  gain  their  affections.  The 
Bishop  comes  to  the  parish  as  a  visitor ;  he  per- 
forms one  function  ;  he  is  not  otherwise  felt  by  the 
people  in  the  life  and  work  of  the  church. 

When  he  does  come,  he  comes  not  as  a  man,  but 
as  an  official,  a  dignitary ;  and  while  the  people 
come  to  see  him  and  to  hear  him,  they  do  not  see 

*  The  total  of  contribiitions  for  the  Diocese  of  Western  New  York 
in  the  past  year  were  I301, 165.43.  Five  per  cent,  of  this  would  amply 
provide  for  the  Episcopate  in  Buffalo  and  Rochester.  Would  it  not 
be  well  for  the  Church  to  give  herself  proper  Episcopal  oversight  and 
economize  somewhere  else?  Let  us  spend  1 16, 000  for  an  Episcopate 
and  1285,165.43  for  other  purposes. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  i^y 

him  often  enough  to  love  him  and  to  feel  him  a 
necessity  in  their  lives,  and  hence  their  coldness  in 
giving  to  him. 

And  this  brings  us  to  the  last  and  chief  reason 
of  our  failure  to  properl}^  provide  for  our  episco- 
pate and  for  our  failure  to  divide  our  diocese,  when 
its  life  requires  division.  And  this  7'eason  is  that., 
in  putting  the  money  question  in  the  foreground.,  in 
saying  that  we  cannot  divide  the  diocese  until  wc 
have  at  least  one  hundred  thousa7id  dollars.,  WB 
ARE  GUILTY  OF  THE  GREAT  APOSTACY, 
We  are  departing  from  the  fundamental  principles 
of  the  kingdom  of  God.  We  are  looking  upon 
that  kingdom  as  if  it  were  simply  a  business  of 
this  world. 

If  I  had  stood  up  in  the  late  Diocesan  Council 
and  said :  "  Gentlemen,  I  hold  in  my  hand  one 
hundred  thousand  dollars  for  the  endowment  of 
the  diocese  of  Rochester,  every  man  would  have 
pricked  up  his  ears  and  the  division  would  have 
been  an  accomplished  fact.  But,  if  I  had  said  that 
the  diocese  of  Rochester  had  now,  and  always  has 
had,  the  only  endowment  which  God  has  ever 
appointed  for  the  support  of  his  Bishops — which 

ENDOWMENT    IS    THE   LOVE   OF    GOD    WORKING    IN 

THE  HEARTS  OF  THE  PEOPLE — then  I  would  have 
been  laughed  to  scorn. 

Yet  this  is  verily  the  case.  This  is  the  only 
endowment  which  God  gave  His  own  Son  when 
He  sent  Him  to  be  the  Shepherd  of  the  sheep. 
When  He  came  into  the  world,  there  was  no  talk 


i^S  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

of  an  hundred  thousand  dollars  endowment  for 
Him.  He  might  have  been  born  an  heir,  to  all 
the  wealth  of  this  world.  He  was  born  an  heir 
only  to  its  poverty.  He  went  forth  on  His  mis- 
sion with  a  single  staff  in  His  hand,  with  only  one 
coat  and  one  pair  of  shoes.  He  was  compelled  to 
look  to  His  Father  daily  for  His  daily  bread. 
God's  love  worked  on  the  hearts  of  some  poor 
women  of  Galilee  and  they  ministered  to  Him  of 
their  substance.  Now,  what  was  good  enough  for 
Jesus  Christ,  is  good  enough  for  any  successor  of 
Jesus  Christ.  And,  I  think,  we  will  all  agree  in 
this :  That  the  nearer  a  Bishop  can  come  to  living 
the  life  of  Jesus  Christ  on  earth,  the  greater  will 
be  the  Bishop. 

There  is  nothing  said  in  the  Books  of  the  Acts 
of  the  Apostles  about  endowments.  The  Apostles, 
on  the  Day  of  Pentecost,  did  not  say  :  "  Assure  us 
of  our  support,  and  we  will  preach  you  the  Gospel 
of  our  Lord."  They  preached  the  Gospel,  and 
their  support  was  assured.  Endowment  came  to 
them  with  the  outpouring  of  the  Holy  Ghost, 
when  the  love  of  God  burning,  like  a  fire,  in  the 
hearts  of  the  converted  peoples,  caused  them  that 
had  lands  or  possessions  to  sell  them  and  lay  the 
price  at  the  Apostles'  feet.* 

I  do  not  say  that  endowments  are  in  themselves 
evil ;  they  may  be  the  source  of  great  and  lasting 
blessing.  It  is  a  beautiful  thing  for  a  man  to  give 
of  his  goods  in  perpetuity  to  God  and  the  poor  5 

*  Book  of  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  Chapters  ii-iii. 


A    Voice  ill  the   Wilderness.  i^g 

who,  when  he  goes  out  of  the  world,  departs  with 
a  God-like  beneficence  and  leaves  an  eternal  bless- 
ing behind  him. 

Such  endowments  of  churches,  schools  and  char- 
ities are  a  part  of  that  treasury  of  the  Saints  which 
we  enjoy  to-day,  and  which  makes  our  lives  easier. 

But  like  all  the  blessings  of  God,  endowment  is 
the  source  of  great  peril  to  the  Church  ;  the  great- 
est peril  indeed  that  has  beset  her  in  her  history. 
The  Church  has  never  suffered  from  her  poverty. 
She  has  suffered  grievously  from  her  riches. 

Whenever  an  endowment  is  considered  as  a 
good  of  and  by  itself ;  apart  from  the  love  of  God  ; 
when  men  rest  in  it,  and  do  not  use  it  to  do  new 
work  for  God,  then  it  becomes  the  greatest  curse 
that  can  afflict  the  life  of  the  Church. 

Never,  in  the  history  of  Christendom,  was  there 
a  Church  more  richly  endowed  with  worldly  wealth 
than  was  the  French  Church  at  the  close  of  the 
last  century.  The  ecclesiastical  bodies  owned 
nearly  one-third  of  the  landed  property  of  the 
country. 

Bishops  were  endowed  with  the  revenues  of 
princes ;  they  had  their  episcopal  palaces  in  their 
dioceses  and  their  episcopal  hotels  in  Paris.  The 
purple  monsigneur  vied  with  the  plum-colored 
courtier  in  the  extravagant  luxury  of  his  living. 

But  when  they  lost  the  love  of  God  working  on 
the  hearts  of  the  people,  all  their  endowments  could 
not  save  them.  They  were  hunted  out  of  their 
palaces    like   rats,  out    of  their   holes.     And  the 


J^o  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

churcli  organization  over  which  they  presided  was 
swept  out  of  existence,  never  to  be  restored/^ 

So  it  was  with  the  Church  of  God,  and  so  it 
always  will  be  when  she  trusts  in  wealth  rather 
than  in  love. 

So,  although  I  have  said  that  fifteen  thousand 
dollars  will  pay  the  diocesan  expenses  of  the  two 
dioceses  of  Buffalo  and  Rochester,  yet  that  is  not 
necessary.  Nothing  is  necessary  but  a  self-devoted 
Bishop.  He  who  can  trust  in  God,  and  God  alone, 
will  be  for  us  the  greatest  of  all  Bishops.  Let  him 
go  forth  with  his  staff  only  into  the  streets  and 
lanes  of  the  city,  into  the  highways  and  byways 
of  the  country.  Let  him  seek  the  people  and  com- 
pel them  to  come  into  the  kingdom  of  God,  and 
then  he  need  not  fear  for  his  own  support ;  the 
people  will  support  him. 

We  hear  a  great  deal  about  a  support  commensu- 
rate with  the  dignity  of  the  episcopal  of&ce.  The 
episcopal  of&ce  reached  the  perfection  of  its  dignity 
when  it  was  naked  on  the  cross. 

It  is  not  necessary  that  a  Bishop  should  live 
like  a  gentleman,  much  less  like  a  prince ;  it  is 
only  necessary  that  he  should  live  like  a  saint. 

*  The  old  Gallican  Church  was  one  of  the  first  institutions  to  perish 
in  the  revolution.  The  National  Assembly  confiscated  the  Church 
lands,  rearranged  the  Bishoprics,  and  made  the  Church  a  department 
of  the  State.  The  Legislative  Assembly  abolished  Christianity  as  a 
religion  altogether.  The  Catholic  religion  was  restored  by  Napoleon, 
but  it  was  not  the  old  Church  with  its  rights  ;  it  was  the  new  Church 
of  the  revolution.     See  Thiers'  French  Revolution. 


CHAPTER   X. 

THE    PRACTICAL    PLAN. 

If  my  view  had  or  could  prevail,  I  would  propose 
to  the  Church  this  practical  plan  of  operation  :  I 
would  organize  a  campaign  of  education.  I  would 
preach  in  every  city,  town  and  hamlet  of  Western 
New  York  the  doctrine  of  the  episcopate  as  it  is 
laid  down  in  this  argument.  I  would,  if  possible, 
rouse  an  enthusiasm  for  the  Church  as  a  divine 
institution,  divinely  organized.  I  would  show  the 
people  the  place  of  the  bishop  in  that  divine 
economy.  I  would  secure  from  the  people  a  gift 
for  the  episcopate,  such  as  each  man  was  able  to 
give. 

And  having  secured  suf&cient  to  protect  the 
episcopate  from  absolute  poverty,  would  give  him 
his  staff  and  send  him  forth  to  his  work  and  to  his 
labor  until  the  evening,  feeling  perfectly  sure  that 
if  he  labored  he  would  have  his  reward. 

I  would  have  this  work  begin  now  so  that  the 
division  could  be  made  at  the  General  Convention 
of  the  Church,  which  meets  in  Washington  in 
1898.  Then  the  Church  in  the  State  of  New  York 
completes  a  rhythmical  period.  The  first  division 
of  the  State  of  New  York  was  made  in  1838,  the 
second  division  in  1868 :  may  we  not  look  for  the 
third  in  1898  ? 

The  first  division  gave  to  the  episcopate  the 
saintly    Delyancey ;    the    second    gave    to    it    the 


IS2  A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness. 

theological  learning  of  Littlejohn,  the  wide,  far- 
reaching  statesmanship  of  Doane,  the  sanctity  and 
scholarship  of  Huntington.  Bvery  division  has 
brought  increased  life  to  the  Church,  increased 
power  to  the  episcopate.  No  call  has  ever  been 
made  on  the  love  and  devotion  of  the  Church  and 
the  Church  has  not  responded. 

CONCI.USION. 

I  do  not  lay  this  argument  before  the  Bishop  of 
the  diocese  to  complicate  in  any  way  the  beginning 
of  a  new  administration  of  ecclesiastical  affairs. 
But  I  do  lay  it  before  him  with  the  firm  conviction 
that  it  should  receive  his  careful  consideration,  and 
that  the  reorganization  of  the  Church  should  have 
his  early  attention. 

I  believe  that  the  principles  of  this  argument 
apply  not  only  to  this  diocese,  but  to  the  Church 
throughout  the  country. 

The  great  work  of  the  Church  in  the  next  period 
of  her  existence  must  be  the  work  of  organization. 
Not  the  assertion  of  principles,  but  the  application 
of  principles.  She  must  endeavor  to  be  in  reality 
what  she  claims  to  be  in  theory. 

The  Episcopal  Church  in  this  country  makes  an 
awful  claim.  She  claims  to  be  the  only  true 
Church  of  God  in  this  land.  This  claim  separates 
us  from  the  communion  of  the  ancient  Church  of 
Rome  on  the  right  hand  and  from  the  modern  com- 
munions of  Protestantism  on  the  left. 


A    Voice  in  the   Wilderness.  ijj 

A  Church  making  such  a  claim  must  justify  its 
claim  before  God  and  before  man.  It  must  be  what 
it  says  it  is.  If  we  are  what  we  say  we  are,  then 
the  reconstruction  and  readjustment  of  Christianity 
must  be  largely  our  work. 

We  have  a  divinely  ordered  ministry,  a  divinely 
settled  creed,  a  divinely  constructed  worship.  Our 
ministry  is  from  Christ,  our  creed  from  the  Holy 
Ghost,  our  worship  from  the  Church.  Our  Church 
is  not  man's  church,  be  he  pope  or  doctor ;  not 
Wesley's  nor  Calvin's,  nor  Leo's.  It  is  the  Church 
of  God.     So  we  say  and  so  we  believe. 

But  what  an  awful  claim  this  is,  and  what  awful 
responsibilities  it  lays  upon  us.  If  we  do  nothing 
to  sustain  it,  it  is  and  will  be  the  most  hideous  of 
unrealities  :  an  unreality  that  will  be  crushed  in 
the  crash  of  realities  that  are  rushing  together  in 
the  modern  world.  Therefore  it  is  that  I  pray 
God  that  we  may  make  good  our  title,  that  we  may 
in  deed,  as  well  as  in  word,  be  the  Church  of  the 
Living  God. 


NOTE. 

The  writer  would  not  have  it  inferred  from  anything  that 
he  has  said  in  this  book,  that  he  faults  the  personal  life  or 
character  of  any  member  of  the  Anglo-American  Episco- 
pate. Such  a  faulting  would,  on  his  part,  be  an  act  of 
insolence,  the  like  of  which  he  trusts  he  could  never  be 
guilty.  He  sees  in  the  Anglo-American  Episcopate  many 
of  the  noblest  men  whom  God  has  ever  raised  up  for  the 
edification  of  His  Church  ;  he  sees  in  that  Episcopate  one 
of  the  great  hopes  of  Christendom. 

What  the  writer  does  fault  is  that  conception  of  the 
Episcopal  OflEice  which  looks  upon  it  as  an  office  of  earthly 
dignity  and  importance.  And  what  the  writer  does  believe 
with  all  his  heart  and  what  it  is  the  main  purpose  of  this 
book  to  maintain,  is  that  the  struggle  of  the  Bishops  of  the 
Western  world  for  political  and  social  leadership  has  lost 
to  them  the  spiritual  leadership  of  mankind. 

That  for  which  the  writer  prays  is  that  the  Bishops  may 
be  once  more  what  their  name  implies,  overseers ;  having 
oversight  of  the  English  people. 


DATE  DUE 

' 

1 

GAYLORD 

PRINTED  IN  U    S.  A. 

